Mohamed Al Fayed, billionaire and father of Princess Diana’s partner Dodi, dies aged 94

Egyptian billionaire, Mohamed Al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods department store, Fulham football club and the father of Dodi Fayed, who died with Princess Diana in a car crash in 1997, died Friday, September 1 in London. He was 94.

He was buried after Friday prayers following a service at Regent’s Park Mosque in London, according to Al Jazeera Egypt.

Al Shorouk newspaper reported that Ashraf Haider, a member of his family, wrote: “My wife’s grandfather, the Egyptian businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed, has died. We belong to God and to Him we shall return.”

Mohamed Al-Fayed was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1929. He moved to the United Kingdom in the mid-1960s and made his fortune in business. He married Samira Khashoggi in 1954 and they had one son, Emad, known as Dodi. The couple divorced in 1956.

Al-Fayed is best known for his ownership of Harrods, which he bought in 1985 and sold to Qatar in 2010 for $2.4bn. He also owned the Ritz Paris Hotel and Fulham Football Club.

In 2013, Al Fayed sold Fulham Football Club to US auto parts billionaire Shahid Khan for a reported $300m.

His eldest son, Dodi, was friends with the royal for about a decade before romance blossomed during a yacht holiday in the south of France.

However they were denied the opportunity to spend their lives together, dying side-by-side in a car crash in Paris.

Al-Fayed was a vocal critic of the British royal family, believing that they were involved in the deaths of his son Dodi and Princess Diana in the 1997 car crash.

Mohamed Al-Fayed believed the couple were killed intentionally “because they still don’t accept that Dodi, my son, an Egyptian, a Muslim, can be the stepfather of the future king,” he said in a 60 Minutes Australia interview.

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