Credit: britannica.com / Dag Hammarskjöld , Swedish Statesman and Secretary-General of the UNITED NATIONS
By Gary Raynaldo / DIPLOMATIC TIMES
It remains plausible that an external attack or threat was a cause of the plane crash in 1961 that killed then-United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, according to a new report into the investigation of the circumstances of his death. The report was written by the designated Eminent Person, Mohamed Chande Othman. “At this juncture, the Eminent Person assesses it to remain plausible that an external attack or threat was a cause of the crash,” Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesperson for UN Secretary General António Guterres told reporters at a Friday press briefing. “The Eminent Person notes that the alternative hypotheses that appear to remain available are that the crash resulted from sabotage, or unintentional human error,” the spokesperson added. Secretary-General Guterres appointed Othman in 2017 to examine the circumstances of Hammarskjöld’s death. Hammarskjöld served as Secretary-General from April 1953 until his death at aged 56. In his 2017 report, Othman wrote:
“There is a significant amount of evidence from eyewitnesses that they observed more than one aircraft in the air, that the other aircraft may have been a jet, that SE-BDY was on fire before it crashed and/or that SE-BDY was fired upon or otherwise actively engaged by another aircraft. It appears plausible that an external attack or threat may have been a cause of the crash, whether by way of a direct attack causing SE-BDY to crash or by causing a momentary distraction of the pilots. Such a distraction need only have taken away the pilot’s attention for a matter of seconds at the critical point at which they were in their descent to have been potentially fatal.”
The 1961 death of Hammarskjöld in a plane crash in the African Congo remains a mystery. What is known is that shortly after midnight on September 18, 1961, a chartered DC-6 airplane carrying Hammarskjold on a peacekeeping mission to the newly independent African nation of the Congo crashed in a forest near Ndola, in the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Hammarskjold and 14 other people aboard, including U.N. staffers and the plane’s crew, were killed; a single survivor died of his injuries six days later. An initial inquiry by Rhodesian authorities reportedly attributed the crash to pilot error but the finding was disputed.
In a report published in 2019, the Eminent Person Othman accused the United States and Britain of withholding information regarding Hammarskjold’s death. The Othman report also cited the presence of foreign forces, including pilots and intelligence agents, on the ground at the time of the crash. The UN spokesperson also noted that Othman has not received, to date, specific responses to his queries from some Member States believed to be holding useful information. He said the Secretary-General has personally followed up on Othman’s outstanding requests for information and calls upon Member States to release any relevant records in their possession.
In mid-1960, Hammarskjold’s attention turned toward central Africa, where the Belgian Congo had recently become the independent Republic of the Congo (now Democratic Republic of the Congo). Shortly after independence was declared, the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga seceded, sparking a violent conflict that would pit U.N. peacekeeping troops supporting the republic’s new central government against Katanga’s separatist forces. The separatists, in turn, were backed by Belgian mining companies seeking control of Katanga’s resources (including uranium).
