Diana and Dodi’s final holiday yacht sinks off French Riviera
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The yacht used by Diana, Princess of Wales, and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, for their final summer holiday in the South of France has sunk off the French Riviera after hitting an unidentified object.
The Cujo, once favoured by Hollywood stars, foundered around 18 miles off Beaulieu-sur-Mer on Saturday.
Police said seven people on board were rescued unharmed following the accident, but the yacht sank to the bottom of the Mediterranean at a depth of almost 8,200ft.
“The skipper of the Cujo issued a Mayday,” one officer was cited as telling French newspaper Le Figaro. “His ship was sinking because of a leak.”
“Rescue boats were sent from Antibes, and, after making sure everyone was safe, gendarmes detected a significant water leak at the level of the starboard front hull. Her owner had activated the pumps and kept the engines running, but this didn’t stop the boat from sinking.”
Salvage boats rushed to the scene but could not save the stricken vessel.
The Cujo rose to media prominence in August 1997 when Fayed bought the vessel, gave it a million-pound refit and invited Diana on board. Images of the pair enjoying their offshore romance were published around the world.
That summer, Diana was also photographed on Sokar, a yacht then owned by Fayed’s father, the retail billionaire Mohamed Fayed.
The pair were seen embracing on the deck less than a year after Diana and the then Prince Charles agreed their divorce.
Shortly afterwards, Diana and Fayed died in a car crash in central Paris.
The Cujo then fell into disrepair. Decommissioned in 1999, it spent years in storage before being bought in 2020 by Simon Kidston, a luxury vehicle dealer, who reportedly paid just £171,000 for it.
He told Robb Report, a luxury magazine, that he later sold the boat to a young Italian socialite. Nice Matin, a French newspaper, said the person’s family owned a property in nearby Cap-Ferrat.
It was unclear whether the person referred to by the newspaper, who was unnamed, still owned the Cujo when it sank.
One local regular at the port of Beaulieu-sur-Mer told the paper that the yacht “often had maintenance problems. It wasn’t in the flush of youth”.
