The owner of London's Harrods is blamed for making last-minute plan changes for his son and Britain's Princess Diana, who later died in a 1997 Paris car crash.
Kez Wingfield, a former bodyguard to Mohammed Al Fayed, claimed that Fayed personally authorized a plan change for his son Dodi and the Princess of Wales because Dodi wanted to flee from photographers, the Telegraph reported on Monday.
Wingfield was one of the bodyguards assigned to the couple during their ill-fated holiday.
"With his son bent on fleeing the paparazzi, it was he [Fayed] who authorized the idiotic change of plan that turned the couple's orderly departure from the Ritz hotel into a back-door car chase that ended in their deaths," the report said.
Wingfield, who no longer works for Fayed, said that the last-minute changes meant that no one knew the couple's movements in advance on the night that they died, the report said.
He described claims that Britain's intelligence service tampered with the Mercedes in which the two died as "ludicrous" because everything was changed at the last minute.
Wingfield has given a statement to a former police commissioner who is investigating the couple's deaths. Fayed reportedly had no comment on Wingfield's statement.
Dodi's father blamed in Diana's death
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