Hackers 'targeted Diana's lover'

Hasnat Khan, the former lover of Diana, Princess of Wales, has revealed that police believe his phone may have been hacked in the months before her inquest.

The 53-year-old heart surgeon said he had been contacted by detectives after his name and mobile telephone number were found in paperwork uncovered during their investigations into phone-hacking.

In an interview with the Mail on Sunday, Dr Khan said he felt "violated" to discover his voicemails may have been intercepted ahead of the belated inquest in 2008.

He said: "To know that someone has been listening to your private messages is awful. It is absolutely terrible. It feels as if you have been robbed. We live in the UK. We are supposed to have civil liberties. I feel really, really violated. I am very angry."

Scotland Yard reopened an inquiry into phone hacking last year - codenamed Operation Weeting - amid a steady flow of new revelations about the practice of intercepting the voice messages of high-profile people.

Dr Khan told the Mail on Sunday that any potential compensation he may receive would be donated to a heart unit he is setting up for children in Pakistan, which he and Diana had dreamed of building.

He said: "Diana was one of those people who didn't just talk about things.

"She was proactive. She would go out and get it done. I think this hospital would be 10 years old by now if she was alive. She did good things because she wanted to, not because of her status. She had an inner desire. It genuinely came from within her."

An inquest into Diana's death heard that friends of the Princess believed her two-year relationship with Dr Khan was serious, and that he had been introduced to Princes William and Harry.

The pair separated in the summer of 1997. During the inquest, Dr Khan insisted in a statement that it had been Diana who broke up with him in the summer of 1997 after her first holiday with the Fayed family in late July when she met Dodi.