Pictures Show Princess Diana's Last Hours

The photograph captures the scene inside the car minutes before the crash that killed Princess Diana. The driver has a glazed look as a body guard tries to wave away pursuing paparazzi. Diana's head is turned away, toward the back windshield.

This and other fleeting images are giving a coroner's jury a picture of the last hours of the princess and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed - hours filled with shopping for a ring, vainly seeking privacy and finally dying as they fled from the paparazzi.

On Wednesday, inquest jurors saw security camera videos of the couple arriving at the Ritz Hotel on Aug. 30, 1997. The images show Fayed leaving for a short car ride across the Place Vendome to Repossi jewelers, then returning a short time later with a brochure. Ritz executive Claude Roulet is seen with what was described as a bag of rings from Repossi's "dis moi oui" (tell me yes) line.

Whether Diana and Fayed planned to announce their engagement the next day is one of the questions before the jury, as is the claim that she was pregnant with Fayed's child. Both claims are part of Mohamed al Fayed's insistence that the couple were the victims of an Establishment plot directed by Prince Philip, the queen's husband.

Shots of two people standing in an elevator may tell you nothing about how they came to die in a car crash hours later. But the images of photographers swarming around their car during the day help explain the apparently hasty change of plans that led the couple to flee from the rear entrance of the hotel shortly after midnight.

The videos shown to the jury were taken from 31 of the 43 security cameras at the Ritz, said Inspector Paul Carpenter, who was part of Metropolitan Police investigative team headed by former chief John Stevens. That team laid the blame for the crash on driver Henri Paul, concluding that he was far over the legal limit for alcohol and driving too fast. Paul also died in the crash.

Many of the images are fuzzy. Diana, one of the world's most photographed women, isn't always instantly recognizable.