A special team meanwhile assembled at the hospital which specialises in emergency treatment

A special team meanwhile assembled at the hospital, which specialises in emergency treatment.When she was taken there the team of more than 10 surgeons discovered she was suffering heart failure from blood loss and immediately opened her chest cavity, where they discovered a wound to the pulmonary vein amidst massive internal bleeding in the chest cavity. While some of the team tried to repair the vessel, the Princess received more than 20 pints of blood, and other doctors used manual and electronic methods to try to shock the heart back into action - including squeezing it to keep blood pumping - because brain damage can rapidly occur without a constant flow of oxygenated blood.But Mr Miles said that such cases are almost hopeless for surgeons."Survival is almost anecdotal," he said "The problem is not just the haemorrhage that has happened. Because the blood transfusion comes from a blood bank, it doesn't clot, and that makes another haemorrhage more likely."Alastair Wilson, another expert emergency surgeon, commented: "I don't think we could have done better here. This was the very best care possible, and I think they did all that they could in the circumstances - which were extreme."Mr Miles added: "With these kind of injuries heroic measures are called for but are very rarely successful."These were mortal injuries.

With such a large and major vessel leaking, a patient can bleed to death very quickly."Initial reports mistakenly said that the Princess had suffered concussion, a broken arm and cuts to her leg in the high-speed crash.. Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed had been playing hide and seek with the paparazzi since late afternoon. Minutes after they arrived by private jet at Le Bourget airport, word reached the picture agencies that the most sought-after couple in the paparazzi world had arrived in one of the main paparazzi capitals The game was on. But there was nothing to suggest that this day's game - just one of a thousand identical days for the Princess and her pursuers - would end so violently and so tragically. Just after 5pm, Paris time, news broke that the Princess and Mr Fayed had landed at Le Bourget.

They had last been seen on the Fayed yacht, Jonikal, at Portofino in the Italian Riviera But the yacht had its own helicopter. It is assumed that it ferried them to the aircraft somewhere in northern Italy or southern France and they flew on to Paris. Half an hour later, a score of photographers had gathered outside the Ritz Hotel in the Place Vendome in the centre of Paris The hotel is owned by Dodi's father, Mohamed al-Fayed. It would be one of the likeliest places for a sighting of the couple The photographers were not disappointed. Soon after 8pm the Princess was seen coming out of the hotel.Photographers in cars and on motorbikes chased the Princess's car to the Champs Elysees, where she went shopping before returning to the Ritz for dinner with Dodi.

At the end of the evening, a number of decoy limousines sped away from the hotel, in an attempt to draw off the pack.Just after midnight, the couple's black Mercedes 600 tried to slip away unseen Seven photographers on motorbikes gave chase. The Mercedes, with the Princess and Dodi in the back seats, a chauffeur and bodyguard in the front, headed down the Rue de Rivoli, and across the Place de la Concorde, too crowded with traffic to give the bikes the slip. But then the car reached the faster roads along the banks of the Seine.Witnesses reported the car travelling at "enormous speed" as it headed west along the Cours Albert Premier and entered the underpass beneath the Place d'Alma, presumably heading for the Fayed townhouse in the fashionable 16th arrondissement. The paparazzi bikes were still in close pursuit.The short tunnel has a wickedly sharp left-hand bend.At about 12 minutes past midnight, the Mercedes struck one of the pillars dividing the westbound carriageway of the tunnel from the eastbound. It struck at least one more pillar and then rebounded against the tunnel wall on the other side.

It finished, the right way up but facing the wrong way, horrifically crushed at the front and the back, with part of the engine in the front passenger seat.The car was thought to have been travelling at 100kph (around 60mph) in a 50kph area. At the presumed point of initial impact, the car was crushed to a depth of one metre, police said. One rumour suggests later that a bike cut in front of the car Police sources say this is not so. There is no evidence that any of the bikes were directly involved in the crash. The working assumption is that the driver misjudged the bend.Emergency services were called to the scene at 12.27am.