Anne, the Princess Royal’s attempted kidnapper has claimed to be innocent.
Ian Ball, the man who tried to kidnap the sister of King Charles in 1974, made some surprising revelations in an interview with DailyMail.
He told the outlet, “I’m an innocent, sane man because I had good reason to believe the gunpowder had been taken out of the bullets and another girl had been substituted for Princess Anne.”
Notably, Ian also claimed that the kidnapping of Anne was meant to be a “hoax”, saying, “The whole idea of performing the hoax was to get the publicity so I could write my autobiography, and I expected to get £10,000 in royalties.”
“To prove my innocence I need to prove the existence of Frank. That will prove I had reason to believe it was all a hoax,” he added.
Speaking of the Princess Royal, he said, “I didn’t scare her. I was more scared than she was.”
Additionally, now Ian has denied Anne saying, “No bloody likely” in a reply to his attempts to remove her from the car, in fact, he added, “She said, ‘You just go away and nobody will think any more about it’, which fuelled the belief that I thought it was a hoax.”
“At the time I thought it wasn’t Princess Anne in the car. She looked nothing like Princess Anne. The personality was nothing like Princess Anne,” Ian noted.
It is worth mentioning that Anne previously shared in a 1980 interview about the incident, recalling her refusal to budge, “We had a sort of discussion about where or where not we were going to go.”
However, a passerby named Ronnie Russell was the one who stopped Ian Ball, punching him in the head several times.