African securityUN to investigate 1961 plane crash that killed UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold
On the night of 17 September 1961, a Transair Sweden DC-6B named Albertina was making its way to a copper mining region in southern Congo (the region is now part of northern Zambia). The plane was carrying UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold, who was on his way to a meeting with Moise Tshombe, the leader of the break-away Katanga province. Hammarskjold never made it. His plane crashed in a densely forested area eight miles from the airport at Ndola, in what was then the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). The cause of the crash has never been determined. The United Nations has now reopened the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Hammarskjold, and appointed a panel of three independent experts to conduct the investigation.
On the night of 17 September 1961, a Transair Sweden DC-6B named Albertina was making its way to a copper mining region in southern Congo (the region is now part of northern Zambia). The plane was carrying UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold, who was on his way to a meeting with Moise Tshombe, the leader of the break-away Katanga province.
Tshombe, with the support of Belgian mining interests, apartheid-era South Africa, and the CIA, led Katanga to secede from Congo after Congo’s first elected president, Patrice Lumumba, appeared to be moving the newly independent Congo – Congo became independent from Belgium in 1960 — toward closer cooperation with the Soviet Union (for more on the Congo story and background on Hammarskjold’s mission, see “Who killed Dag Hammarskjold? Sweden calls for new inquiry into 1961 death of UN chief,” HSNW, 22 December 2014).
Hammarskjold never made it. His plane crashed in a densely forested area eight miles from the airport at Ndola, in what was then the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).
The cause of the crash has never been determined.
The United Nations has now reopened the investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Hammarskjold, and appointed a panel of three independent experts to conduct the investigation.
The UN said in a statement on Monday that the experts, led by a Tanzanian jurist Mohamed Chande Othman, would be given three months to assess the “probative value” of evidence which has surfaced in the five decades since the last UN inquiry into the causes of the crash. The other two panelists are Kerryn Macaulay, an Australian aviation expert, and Henrik Larsen, a ballistics specialist from Denmark.
Susan Williams, a British academic who has written what is regarded as the most authoritative account of the plane’s crash (see her Who Killed Hammarskjold?: The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa [2012]), told the New York Times that “it is extremely important for member states to deliver up documents,” including unpublished material from the United States, Britain, South Africa, France and Belgium.
The Times notes that some of the panel’s most sensational testimony is likely to be that of two American intelligence officers who were working at two listening posts, hundreds of miles apart, in the Mediterranean.
Both officers claim to have heard evidence that the plane was shot down, and one of them maintains that Americans were implicated.
