LONDON (AFP) - A plan to kill a Balkan leader, allegedly Serbias Slobodan Milosevic, was not a blueprint for a plot to murder princess Diana and her lover Dodi Fayed, the couples inquest heard Tuesday.
A former agent with Britains overseas intelligence service MI6, Richard Tomlinson, has claimed they sought to kill Milosevic in the early- to mid-1990s by staging a tunnel car crash using lights to blind his driver.
Dodi Fayeds father, Mohamed Al-Fayed, has claimed such a method was used to kill his son and the princess as part of a British establishment plot orchestrated by Queen Elizabeth IIs husband, Prince Philip.
But an MI6 officer, identified only as "A", told the London inquest that although he mooted the plan to a senior manager, assassination was against the ethos of the intelligence service and it was taken no further.
"(Id) been brought up and trained in a service that dealt with a peaceful Cold War, if I can use the phrase, spy games," said the officer, who headed a team of agents sourcing information from the Balkans at the time.
"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 people.
"It seemed to me at least appropriate that we at least revisit that dictum of the service and see if we felt obliged to revise it in exceptional circumstances."
The officer denied Milosevic was the target but said he had made the proposal "as it seemed to me we might be running up to this extreme radical national politician taking power".
"It seemed to me there might be some analogy with 1932 (the year before Nazi leader Adolf Hitler came to power).
"So, the question I was posing was there should have been a plan in place to take action before the Hitler option took place."
"A" said his proposal was just a "bare bones" plan that would have been carried out by either local militia or special forces, the jury was told.
He said he had never heard of the "blinding lights" plan until he saw a television programme on conspiracy theories about the princesss 1997 crash.
Tomlinson told a French investigation the Paris crash bore an "eerie similarity" to a plan he had seen worked on by MI6.
But the inquest jury was told there was no mention of a staged crash in the 1996 draft of his book "The Big Breach", only in versions after Diana died.
"A" told the court it was "absolutely unthinkable" that Prince Philip could have ordered such a thing because, as Al-Fayed alleges, there was opposition to her marrying a Muslim and being pregnant by him.
Another MI6 witness, a female manager identified only as "Miss X" told the hearing earlier that British intelligence was not keeping files on the princess or Dodi at the time they were killed, nor was there a plan to kill them.
No files were found on the couple, their bodyguards, the photographers who pursued them on their fateful journey, Prince Philip or other members of the royal family when she trawled an electronic database for British police.
Nothing was founder either on James Andanson, whom Al-Fayed believes was the driver of a mysterious white Fiat Uno car linked to the crash, nor of MI6 using such a car in the French capital, she told the jury.
But a card was kept on the multi-millionaire Harrods department store owner although there was no record of anything detailed or that he was monitored.
And only one relevant reference to the Paris Ritz was found in her data trawl, dating from November 5, 1997 -- more than two months after the crash.
It referred to the couples chauffeur, Henri Paul, being acting head of security at the Ritz and speculating about whether he had been a contact of the French domestic intelligence service.
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