Late Shah's daughter found dead

LONDON, England - Princess Leila Pahlavi, the youngest daughter of the late Shah of Iran, has been found dead in a London hotel.

Staff at the Leonard Hotel in London's West End discovered the body of the 31-year-old princess on Sunday evening, the UK Press Association reported.

Police said there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death, and a postmortem did not reveal any cause, PA said, citing Scotland Yard.

CNN.com Europe More news from our Europe edition     COUNTRY PROFILES At a glance: Iran Provided by CountryWatch.com    IN-DEPTH Iran Decides 2001   •  Overview   •  Analysis: Turnout is key   •  Key players   •  ElectionWatch: Iran   •  Revolution timeline   •  TIME Special Report

"It is classed as an unexplained death," a spokeswoman for Scotland Yard was quoted saying.

In a statement issued from Paris on Monday, Princess Leila's mother, Queen Farah, said the princess had died in her sleep after a long bout with depression.

''Exiled at the age of nine, she never surmounted the death of her father . . . to whom she was particularly close,'' the statement from the former empress said.

''She could not stand living far from Iran and shared wholeheartedly the suffering of her countrymen.''

Princess Leila, born in Tehran in 1970, fled her native country following the overthrow of her father, the late Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi, in the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Leila was the youngest of the late Shah's five children, and the fourth by his third wife, the former empress Farah Pahlavi.

The princess, who was unmarried at the time of her death, fled the Iranian capital at the age of nine after her father was deposed. She eventually settled in the U.S. state of Massachusetts following her father's death from cancer at a Cairo hospital in July 1980.

After attending a Massachusetts public school, the princess graduated in 1992 from Brown University, part of America's elite Ivy League.

Since then, she has reportedly divided her time between Europe and the United States.

In a magazine interview last September, Leila spoke of her nostalgia for Iran.

"I have spent almost my entire life abroad, but I remain just as Iranian as if I had never left my country."