Five officers investigated over police handling of Al Fayed allegations
A serving officer and four former officers are under scrutiny as investigators revisit two 2008 reports that may have exposed Mohamed Al Fayed far earlier.
The Metropolitan Police is now examining whether five officers mishandled reports about Mohamed Al Fayed, a review that goes to the heart of how a wealthy and powerful suspect was treated when complaints first surfaced. The Independent Office for Police Conduct said on 8 January 2025 that two victim-survivor complaints, both tied to separate allegations reported in 2008, would be investigated by the Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards under its direction.
That probe sits inside a far larger reckoning. The Met had already been reviewing 21 allegations reported before Al Fayed’s death in 2023, and by 6 March 2026 detectives said 154 victims had come forward with allegations of sexual assault, rape, sexual exploitation and human trafficking. By then, four suspects had been interviewed under caution in the wider investigation into people who may have enabled his abuse. The force said those suspects were three women and one man, aged in their 40s, 50s and 60s, questioned on suspicion of aiding and abetting rape and sexual assault, assisting the commission of sexual offences and human trafficking for sexual exploitation.
The scale of the scandal widened after the BBC exposed allegations against the former Harrods owner in September 2024. Police later said they had been approached by 21 women before Al Fayed died in 2023, and by November 2024 more than five people were being investigated for potentially facilitating his abuse. By August 2025, that number of reports had risen to 146. The Met says the alleged offending stretches from 1977 to 2014, a span that raises sharp questions about repeated missed opportunities across decades, from initial complaints to later internal reviews.
Al Fayed died in 2023 aged 94 and was never charged. Survivors and campaigners have argued that the issue is not only the abuse itself but the systems that allowed it to continue at Harrods and elsewhere. On 28 May 2025, survivors delivered a letter to Prime Minister Keir Starmer calling for a public inquiry, saying only a statutory process with powers to compel witnesses can establish how the abuse was enabled and whether institutions failed the women who came forward.
The officer investigation will test whether current police safeguards would have changed anything if they had existed earlier. For survivors, the central question remains whether the state will now trace the full timeline of what was known, who knew it, and why action did not come sooner.
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