The heart surgeon who had a two-year relationship with Princess Diana told police he doubted she was pregnant when she died because she always took her contraceptive pills, a coroner’s jury heard on Monday.

He also said the couple had discussed marriage but he never proposed because he felt her fame would make his life “hell”, since they would never be able to do normal things together.

Surgeon Hasnat Khan has refused to testify at the coroner’s inquest into the 1997 deaths of Diana and boyfriend Dodi Fayed, but the jury heard a statement he made to London’s Metropolitan Police in London on September 24, 2004.

The doctor told police their romance started spontaneously after they met when she visited a patient at the Royal Brompton Hospital, where he was working.

He refuted Mohamed Al Fayed’s claim that Diana was pregnant when she died, saying she was “very particular” about taking birth control pills during the two years when he had an intimate relationship with her.

Khan said the relationship ended after Diana’s first visit to France as a guest of the Al Fayed family in July 1997. He said Diana did not seem “her normal self” and he thought she had “met someone else from the Mohamed al Fayed contingent”.

“I did not know who it was. It could have been a bodyguard or anyone,” said Khan. “I was surprised when she said there was no one else. At a second meeting, she said it was all over between us, but she denied there was anyone else.”

Khan said he was unaware of her romance with Dodi Fayed before the couple’s death in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997.

“It was only when I heard the news on the radio that I learned about Dodi,” Khan said. “I think she wanted to be with someone who was happy to be seen with her in public.”