26 years after Lady Diana’s death, Dodi Al Fayed’s two superyachts, the Cujo and the Jonikal, both suffered tragic fates. The Princess of Wales had spent her last summer aboard both vessels, on the shores of the Riviera.
The tragedy has come full circle. The Cujo, the yacht that hosted Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed’s love affair, sank off Beaulieu-sur-Mer on the Côte d’Azur on Saturday, July 29. The boat, measuring around twenty meters in length, is said to have suffered damage to its hull, causing it to sink.
According to a statement shared on Facebook by the Alpes-Maritimes Gendarmes, a division of the French army, a distress call was made by passengers at around 12:30 local time on July 29. Less than an hour after the call, a rescue team arrived on the scene to find that the bow of the vessel was partially submerged.
“The yacht’s cabins were already flooded, and only a few suitcases located in the galley and on deck could be recovered by the gendarmes,” reads the press release.
The seven occupants on board had already been evacuated and were safely aboard a nearby lifeboat. Rescue crews and passengers then quickly left the area, while the boat sank to a depth of 2,500 feet on the ocean floor.
Last summer
The remarkable yacht had been launched in 1972, at the request of her first owner, John von Neumann. According to the Robb Report, Von Neumann commissioned the Italian shipyard Baglietto to design a vessel “faster than any other motoryacht at sea”. Subsequently, Von Neumann sold the boat to arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, who then passed it on to his nephew, Dodi Al-Fayed.
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