Serving Met officer and four ex-officers investigated over handling of Al Fayed allegations

Mohamed Al Fayed, the Egyptian businessman known for being the father of Dodi Fayed and for having been the owner of Harrods department store in London, was posthumously accused of numerous sexual assaults by dozens of women, many of them employees. Investigations following his death in 2023 revealed that several of the incidents had been reported to police at the time and that those reports had not led to effective investigations.

The opening of an internal investigation process within the Metropolitan Police aims to determine whether there was negligence, active cover-up or simply procedural failures in the handling of those complaints. The case has wider resonance because it is not the first time the Met has been accused of failing to act on assault complaints made against powerful men. The Jimmy Savile case, to mention the best known, showed a similar pattern decades earlier.

The credibility of police institutions in handling sexual assault cases has been under intense scrutiny in the United Kingdom for several years. Internal investigations are the formal accountability mechanism, but their real effectiveness and the independence with which they are conducted are regularly questioned by victim organisations and police reform groups.