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.
Buried on Friday
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.
What do you know about Al-Fayed?
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.
