Milosevic plot not blueprint for Diana

The spectre of Slobodan Milosevic was raised at the Diana inquest on Tuesday, when the High Court jury heard how a plan to kill a Balkan leader - allegedly the late Serbian president - was not a blueprint for a plot to murder the Princess and her lover Dodi Fayed.

The former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson had previously claimed at the inquest that the British intelligence agency had sought to kill Milosevic in the 1990s by staging a tunnel car crash using lights to blind his driver. Both Tomlinson and Dodi's father, Mohamed Fayed, have suggested that the same method could have been used to blind Diana's driver Henri Paul - with Fayed senior claiming that it was part of a British establishment plot orchestrated by the Duke of Edinburgh.

But on Tuesday an MI6 officer, identified only as 'A', told the London inquest that while he had once mooted a plan to deal with an unnamed Balkans warlord to a senior manager, assassination was deemed to be against MI6's ethos and the idea was taken no further. Denying that the target was Milosevic, 'A' told the court that his proposal was just a "bare bones" plan that would have been carried out by either local militia or special forces. However, he said he had never heard of any "blinding lights" plan until he saw a TV programme on conspiracy theories about the 1997 Paris crash.

Also on Tuesday, another MI6 witness, a manager identified only as 'Miss X', told the hearing from behind a screen that British intelligence was not keeping files on Diana or Dodi at the time they were killed, nor was there a plan to assassinate them. Nor was there a file on Prince Philip, said Miss X, adding that no files were kept on the royal family. There was, she admitted, a card kept on Mohamed Fayed - although there was no record that he was ever monitored.