http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080226/tpl-uk-britain-diana-yugoslavia-2d5f2 90_1.html MI6 squashed Balkan assassination plan By Mark Trevelyan Reuters - Tuesday, February 26 06:53 pm LONDON (Reuters) - An officer of MI6 floated a plan in 1993 to assassinate a radical Serbian nationalist but the idea was immediately squashed, the inquest into Princess Diana's death was told on Tuesday. The officer, identified only as 'A', told the court that he conceived the idea as a "humanitarian-driven proposal" to try to prevent even greater bloodshed in the Balkans. "The thought occurred to me that there could be a responsibility on us to explore whether we should have a plan in place in the event of this radical person, this leader, coming to power in Serbia -- in fact, in the FRY, former republic of Yugoslavia," A testified at the inquest. He did not identify the target, but denied allegations by a renegade intelligence officer, Richard Tomlinson, that the plan was directed against Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic. He said this would be "absurd" because Milosevic was seen at the time as central to diplomatic efforts to end the Balkan wars. The inquest into the deaths of Princess <http://uk.news.yahoo.com/fc/princess-diana.html> Diana and her lover Dodi al-Fayed in a Paris car crash in 1997 is examining allegations by Dodi's father Mohamed that they were murdered by Britain's security services. The Balkan plan is relevant to the hearing because it raises the question of whether MI6 would ever carry out an assassination -- something its former head, Sir Richard Dearlove, emphatically denied in testimony last week. Investigations in Britain and France have concluded Dodi and Diana died in a tragic accident while trying to escape pursuing press photographers and that their driver Henri Paul, who was also killed, was drunk. ROYAL ORDER TO KILL? Mohamed al-Fayed alleges they were killed on the orders of Prince Philip, because the royal family could not accept the prospect of Diana marrying Dodi, an Egyptian Muslim. In Tuesday's evidence, witness A said he knew that assassination was against the agency's principles. "The reason why I considered it was because I had been brought up and trained in a service that dealt with peaceful Cold War, if I can use the phrase, spy games. Suddenly here I am, confronted by a situation where we are dealing with a bloody civil war in the centre of Europe, where tens of thousands of innocent people are being killed," he said. The concern at the time was that Milosevic could be toppled and replaced by the unnamed nationalist extremist, leading to greater ethnic cleansing and more deaths, he said. The outline of the assassination plan was to use either dissidents inside Yugoslavia or British "military options", A said, declining to go into further detail. He said he outlined the idea in a brief conversation with the head of MI6's overall regional command and was told to "put it down on a piece of paper". But when he had the proposal typed up by his personal assistant, he was quickly confronted by his line manager, who had not received a copy of the memorandum. The line manager "asked what I thought I was doing and (said) that it had caused a stir and that an order had gone out for the document to be destroyed", A said. He denied the suggestion that his proposal had included the idea of carrying out the assassination by staging a car crash in a tunnel. Diana and Dodi died when their car, driven at high speed by Paul, struck a pillar in a Paris road tunnel. (editing by Tim Pearce) [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
