"Oh my God, what's happened?"
Those were supposedly the final words Princess Diana ever said, according to a fire chief who at the scene of her fatal car crash in Paris in 1997.
For the first time ever, Sgt. Xavier Gourmelon is speaking to media about what he saw and heard that fateful evening, claiming Diana was in a full-fledged state of confusion after the Mercedes she was riding in crashed in an underpass while being chased by paparazzi.
Xavier, who has previously only spoken to police about that night, detailed the chilling evening in a chat with The Daily Mail. Diana, he said, was still "moving and talking" when he arrived on scene.
"She spoke in English and said, 'Oh my God, what's happened?' I could understand that, so I tried to calm her. I held her hand," he said.
Xavier said the royal seemed dazed after the crash but appeared to be okay. At the time he didn't know who he was helping. But, after putting Diana in an ambulance, the captain on scene told the firefighter who he had been treating.
"He tells me who she is and then, yes, I recognize her, but in the moment I didn't," he said.
The first person on scene, off-duty doctor Frederic Mailliez, also said he didn't realize it was Diana when he got there. Diana, he said, was "sitting on the floor in the back" of the Mercedes.
"I discovered then she was a most beautiful woman and she didn't have any [serious] injuries to her face. She was not bleeding [then] but she was almost unconscious and was having difficulty breathing," he said. "She looked fine for the first minutes."
"So I began to speak English to her, saying that I was a doctor and that the ambulance was on its way and everything is going to be all right," he recalled.
Diana would eventually succumb to injuries sustained in the crash.