WEBWATCH
Once, Mohamed Al Fayed was just a very rich Egyptian immigrant who owned Britain's toniest department store, Harrods. All that changed in the summer of 1997, when one of his sons began dating the toniest member of Britain's royal family, Diana. We all know how that ended up. From the moment Dodi and Di expired, though, the elder Al Fayed has looked beyond the wreckage of their drunk-driven Mercedes for deeper causes to the tragedy (earlier this year, he was quoted as saying he is "99.5 percent certain" a conspiracy was behind the deaths - perhaps, the press speculated, as a way of shutting down Di's anti-landmine campaign). Now the billionaire has brought his truth quest to the Web, launching www.alfayed.com/. The site ostensibly offers "a comprehensive database of newspaper articles relevant to Mr. Mohamed Al Fayed's interesting life," but in fact most of the scrapbook concerns the Couple - the Romance, the Crash, the Funerals, the Aftermath.
The tycoon indulges in a little self-promotion, too. Among the site's frontdoor images of Al Fayed's very important properties (the Paris Ritz, for one) is a picture of a British passport - he's been fighting the Home Office, so far unsuccessfully, to get citizenship.
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