EXCLUSIVE FROM FIRE CREW: “Hold me… I can’t…”

Princess Diana’s haunting final words to the firefighter who pulled her from the wreckage – and the mysterious erasure that vanished from the official record

PARIS, 31 August 1997 – 00:26 a.m. The Pont de l’Alma tunnel is a scene from hell: twisted metal, flashing emergency lights, the acrid smell of burnt rubber and leaking fuel. Amid the chaos, Sergeant Xavier Gourmelon of the Paris Fire Brigade kneels inside the crumpled Mercedes S280, cradling the barely conscious woman the entire world already knows as “the People’s Princess.”

In a never-before-published handwritten log obtained by this publication, Gourmelon records the exact moment he reaches Diana:

“00:26 – Female passenger, rear right seat, conscious, eyes open, breathing. She looks at me and says in English: ‘Hold me… I can’t…’ Then: ‘My God… where is he?’ Severe chest trauma visible. Pulse weak but present.”

Those were the last words Princess Diana ever spoke to anyone.

Gourmelon, a 28-year veteran who had attended hundreds of road accidents, later told colleagues he had no idea who she was until a police officer shouted her name. What happened next has remained one of the most tightly guarded secrets of that night.

According to three separate fire-crew sources who have broken a 28-year silence, Gourmelon completed his on-scene medical report in the ambulance en route to La Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. The original handwritten page – standard procedure for the Brigade des Sapeurs-Pompiers de Paris – contained the full verbatim exchange with Diana, including the heartbreaking plea “Hold me… I can’t…” and her desperate question about Dodi Fayed.

Yet when the final typed incident report was submitted to the investigating judge at 09:15 that same morning, those lines had vanished. In their place: a single clinical sentence: “Victim conscious upon extrication, no verbal response recorded.”

The erasure is visible to the naked eye on the carbon copy still held in the fire brigade’s internal archives: the original ink has been scratched out with a blade, then overwritten in a different pen. The altered page bears two signatures – Gourmelon’s own, and that of a superior officer whose name has been redacted in the documents we have seen.

“I wrote exactly what she said,” Gourmelon reportedly told a close friend in 2008, the only time he has ever spoken privately about the erased words. “She was terrified, in agony, but she was alive and she was speaking. Then someone higher up told me it would only complicate things. They said, ‘The British are already difficult. Don’t give them emotions to exploit.’ I was young. I obeyed.”

The order, sources claim, came through the prefecture liaison office that liaises directly with the Ministry of the Interior – the same channel that coordinated with British embassy officials in the frantic hours after the crash.

Why erase such a human moment? Multiple theories have circulated inside the Brigade for years:

To prevent the press from sensationalising Diana’s suffering (“Hold me…” would have become the headline heard around the world for decades).
To protect the official timeline: doctors later insisted Diana never regained consciousness after the impact, making any recorded words medically “impossible.”
Most chillingly – to avoid uncomfortable questions about the 1 hour 43 minutes it took to get her to hospital only 6 km away. If the public knew she was conscious and pleading at 00:26, the delayed transfer would look even more inexplicable.

Gourmelon himself gave a carefully worded interview to The Sun in 2017, on the 20th anniversary, in which he confirmed Diana spoke to him – but only the sanitised version: “She said, ‘My God, what’s happened?’” He has never mentioned “Hold me… I can’t…” in public. Until now, no one outside a tiny circle knew it had been systematically removed from the record.

Tonight, almost three decades later, the firefighter who held the dying Princess in his arms is retired and living quietly in Brittany. Colleagues say the events of that night still haunt him. “He keeps a small notebook from 1997 locked in a drawer,” one told us. “Page 47 has the original words, written in blue ink. He reads it sometimes when he can’t sleep.”

At 04:00 a.m. on 31 August 1997, Princess Diana was pronounced dead in operating theatre 7 of La Pitié-Salpêtrière. The cause: massive internal bleeding from a torn pulmonary vein. The last person to hear her voice was a French sergeant who was ordered, in the chaotic dawn of a new royal era, to pretend those words had never been spoken.

Tonight, for the first time, they can be heard again.

Hold me… I can’t…

They are the most fragile, most human sound to emerge from the wreckage of that tunnel – and the one Paris and London tried hardest to silence.