Fayed faked dementia to evade prosecution, says son

LONDON: Mohamed Al Fayed pretended he had dementia so he could evade prosecution for sexual crimes, his son has said.

Police now believe Fayed may have raped and abused at least 111 women and girls over nearly four decades.

His youngest son, Omar Fayed, 37, compared his father to a Nazi war criminal in an interview with the Mail on Sunday and said that others got his father “off the hook on the grounds he was mentally incapacitated”. He added that “afterwards it was back to business – he was as sharp as a tack”.

Omar Fayed, a tech entrepreneur who was once due to inherit Harrods, said he wished the “investigation had been able to take its course when he was still alive”. Fayed died last year at the age of 94.

Mohamed Al Fayed may have raped and abused at least 111 women and girls, say police

Omar Fayed added: “If a Nazi general is found to have been hiding in the Algarve for the last 50 years, then of course he should be tried.”

His comments suggest that police missed an opportunity to bring charges when allegations surfaced in 2017 and 2018, when his father was in his late 80s.

One woman who made a statement to the police in 2018 about sexual abuse by the former Harrods owner was told that he was too old to be prosecuted and that he was not in the right state of mind because of dementia.

A year earlier Fayed had been the subject of a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary that accused him of sexually harassing young employees, including a 17-year-old he had recruited.

An unsuccessful attempt to prevent broadcast was made on the grounds that Fayed was mentally incapacitated.