Drunk?

France has two legal drink-drive limits. Anything over 50 milligrammes of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood is classed as a misdemeanour. Anything over 80 milligrammes - the same as in Britain - is a criminal matter.

A brief official statement from the office of the public prosecutor said later that Henri Paul had been found to have a blood alcohol content of 175 milligrammes per 100 millilitres. That is the sort of reading to be expected from someone who had drunk well over a bottle of wine.

A second test conducted for the authorities by an independent laboratory - a routine procedure - is reported to have given an even more damning reading: 187 milligrammes.

Experts agree that this would have a severe effect on his abilities, especially when it came to driving a vehicle.

Some newspapers have quoted staff at the Ritz as saying that when recalled to work on the Saturday night he was clearly drunk and excitable.

Mr Paul's family and the Al Fayed organisation have disputed that he could have been in such a state of intoxication. The Harrods spokesman in London, Michael Cole, said: "He spent more than two hours on his security duties, working with other members of staff, who had no reason at all to suspect that he had been drinking.

"There were no visible or other signs of imbibing. If he had taken three times the French legal limit, isn't it likely he would have been falling over or staggering? No one saw any behaviour which was untoward."

At a news conference organised by Harrods on Friday, Professor Peter Vanezis, Professor of Forensic Medicine and Science at Glasgow University, claimed that the forensic evidence that Mr Paul had drunk more than three times the alcohol limit was unreliable.

However, the Al Fayed organisation declined to release the results of a third blood test it commissioned.