London - Harrods department store has branded claims that Dodi Fayed was a cocaine-snorting member of the jet-set drug scene during the 1980s as a "despicable" attempt to defame the dead. A statement released early this morning by the store, owned by Mohamed Al Fayed, Dodi's father, said an article in Vanity Fair magazine about Dodi's life was "particularly cruel."
It denied claims that the playboy, who was killed in Paris with Diana, Princess of Wales, was a liar who dabbled in drugs - at one time having a kilo of cocaine in his apartment - and was reckless with money.
The statement said: "As the Fayed family cannot take legal steps to safeguard Dodi's reputation, this piece of journalism must be treated with the contempt it deserves in the hope that it will be seen for what it is - a tawdry exploitation of a man who is not here to defend himself."
Vanity Fair quotes one unnamed friend as saying the millionaire Egyptian used to buy a kilo of cocaine a week, and that he saw the stash in his suite at the Waldorf Towers Hotel in New York.
Another friend, Ms Nona Summers, remarked: "He was into cocaine . . . He didn't tell the truth about many things, but he told me he had done it and that he had got himself in trouble and stopped." A third, Mr Jack Martin, said: "Dodi bought a lot more for others than for himself," but admitted he had never seen him high.
But Vanity Fair stood by its article, issuing a line-by-line rebuttal of Harrods' attack and saying it had documentary evidence that Dodi was in debt when he died.