Princess Zahra Aga Khan interview: I know what happened to Shergar

Exclusive: Truth behind the death of the iconic horse, stolen in 1983, has been unknown... until now.

Princess Zahra Aga Khan at her horse training establishment in Chantilly, France Credit: Anya Campbell Photography

It is the greatest mystery in sporting history: What really happened to Shergar? The theories are plentiful and many of them absurd: that the world’s most best-known stallion, which was stolen from an Irish stud yard on the night of February 8, 1983, had been traded to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi by the IRA in exchange for weapons, that it had been seen being ridden by Lord Lucan, or that it was part of a mafia revenge plot.

But now, 43 years on, the truth can be confirmed – by Princess Zahra Aga Khan, the daughter of Shergar’s owner, the Aga Khan.

“I remember everything about Shergar,” she says in her first major interview since taking over her father’s horse-racing empire after his death last February. “We now know the horse was killed within two days [of being kidnapped]. They did so in an awful way.”

It has always been suspected that Shergar’s disappearance was the work of the IRA. They were the immediate suspects when six armed and masked men arrived at Ballymany Stud on that night 43 years ago. They told James Fitzgerald, head groom, that they were taking Shergar and would demand a £2m ransom for a horse that had become a sensation after obliterating the field to win the 1981 Derby, with his victory by 10 lengths memorably soundtracked by Peter Bromley, the BBC commentator, when he said: “You need a telescope to see the rest!”