Search Results for: Dag Hammarskjold

Investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him

Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961.

Courtesy of Dr. Susan Williams

United Nations General Assembly

Seventy-sixth session
Agenda item 131

Letter dated 25 August 2022 from the Secretary-General addressed to the President of the General Assembly

I have the honour to refer to General Assembly resolution 74/248 concerning the investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him on flight SE-BDY on the night of 17 to 18 September 1961.

In accordance with paragraph 1 of resolution 74/248, in March 2020 I reappointed Mohamed Chande Othman as Eminent Person to continue to review the information received and possible new information made available by Member States, including by individuals and private entities, to assess its probative value and to draw conclusions from the investigations already conducted. Owing to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in December 2020 the General Assembly decided, with my support, to extend the mandate of the Eminent Person, and also requested me to report to the Assembly before the end of the seventy-sixth session on progress that had been made.

I recall that I had previously appointed Mr. Othman as Eminent Person for successive periods in 2018 and 2017, pursuant to General Assembly resolutions 72/252 and 71/260, respectively, and I reported to the General Assembly on progress made in 2019 (A/73/973) and 2017 (A/71/1042). I also recall that I had previously appointed Mr. Othman as Head of the Independent Panel of Experts, established in accordance with Assembly resolution 69/246.

I renew my profound gratitude to the Eminent Person. The United Nations is indebted to him for this exemplary and consequential work in the pursuit of the full truth concerning the tragic event.

I am encouraged that the Eminent Person has received significant new information and that further advancements in the body of relevant knowledge have been made, following the review of many thousands of pages of records and forensic tests and consultation with experts. I note that such new information includes the areas of probable intercepts by Member States of relevant communications; the capacity of the armed forces of Katanga, or others, to have conducted a possible attack on flight SE-BDY; the presence in the area of foreign paramilitary and intelligence personnel; and further new information relevant to the context and surrounding events of 1961.

As in the 2019 report, the Eminent Person assesses that it remains plausible that an external attack or threat was a cause of the crash. I take note of the conclusion by the Eminent Person that it would not be reasonable at this point to reach a conclusion as to the cause of the tragic event based on presently available but incomplete information. At the same time, I am encouraged by the conclusion of the Eminent Person that, given the growing body of evidence, there remain only a limited number of hypotheses to explain what occurred on that fateful night.

I wish to express my gratitude to Member States, independent high-ranking officials appointed by Member States (Independent Appointees) to conduct reviews of their intelligence, security and defense files and private individuals and entities for their cooperation with the Eminent Person and their willingness to provide additional information.

I am encouraged that key Member States have committed at a high level to full cooperation and provided assurances that search requests have or will engage appropriate security, intelligence and defense agencies, and that Independent Appointees from a number of Member States have provided, and may provide in future, additional information. I am also encouraged by the significant information that has been provided to the Eminent Person by private individuals and non-governmental entities.

At the same time, the Eminent Person notes that: (a) no significant information has been provided by key Member States since mid-2017; (b) it is almost certain that further relevant information exists, including radio or other communications; (c) Member States have yet to discharge their burden of proof to show that they have conducted a full review of their records and archives resulting in full disclosure; (d) Independent Appointees may need more time to provide information; and (e) it would be neither judicious nor responsible to reach a conclusion without the benefit of all potentially material information, in circumstances where such information has been shown to be almost certain to exist.

Accordingly, I support the recommendation of the Eminent Person that the United Nations appoint an independent person to continue the work undertaken pursuant to the current mandate of the Eminent Person. I also support the Eminent Person’s recommendation that key Member States be again urged to appoint or reappoint Independent Appointees to determine whether relevant information exists in their security, intelligence and defense archives. More broadly, I call on Member States to ensure comprehensive access to all archives and provide relevant information, more than 60 years after the tragic event, and agree with the proposal of the Eminent Person that potential modes of disclosure and conditions of confidentiality be offered to Member States, without necessarily requiring that relevant information be disclosed in full or publicly.

I also support the Eminent Person’s recommendation that all Member States be encouraged to make assistance available to the independent person, including forensic analysis or other research.

Finally, I support the recommendation of the Eminent Person that the United Nations continue to work towards making key documents of the Dag Hammarskjöld investigation publicly available through a dedicated online collection, including documents pertaining to the 1961 United Nations Commission on Investigation, the 2013 Hammarskjöld Commission, the 2015 United Nations Independent Panel of Experts and the 2017 and 2019 reports of the Eminent Person, as well as his present report.

It remains our shared responsibility to pursue, with renewed urgency, the full truth of what happened on that fateful night in 1961. We owe this to Dag Hammarskjöld, to the members of the party accompanying him and to their respective families. We owe this also to the United Nations. I consider this to be our solemn duty and I will do everything I can to support this endeavour.

I call on the General Assembly to remain seized of the matter and to endorse the report of the Eminent Person and his recommendations, as discussed above.

(Signed) António Guterres

DOWNLOAD AND READ THE COMPLETE REPORT HERE:

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More Clues, and Questions, in 1961 Crash That Killed Dag Hammarskjold

By Rick Gladstone and Alan Cowell Feb. 17, 2019

A few provocative tidbits have emerged about the mysterious 1961 death of United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, just months before the world body may forever close the book on the unsolved case.

The new information, which appears to corroborate the theory that South African or Belgian mercenaries may have forced the plane carrying Mr. Hammarskjold and 15 others to crash in a conflict region of Africa, is far from conclusive.

But it has provided more fuel for questions about what powerful nations may still be withholding in their intelligence archives about the crash, a defining event nearly six decades ago in emerging post-colonial Africa.

Mr. Hammarskjold, a pipe-smoking Swedish diplomat whose name now adorns buildings in and around the United Nations headquarters in New York, was on a mission to settle a conflict over Katanga, a rebellious part of Congo, when his aircraft, a chartered DC-6, crashed just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961.

The aircraft, named the Albertina, was just a few minutes from its destination: an airfield in Ndola, in what was then the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia.

Whether the crash was accidental has been at the crux of inquiries that have persisted to this day, generating many conspiracy theories that colonial-era mining interests, perhaps backed by Western intelligence agencies, had plotted to assassinate him.

The inquiries have turned Mr. Hammarskjold’s death into the biggest mystery in the history of the United Nations.

Now, as a prominent jurist retained by Mr. Hammarskjold’s most recent successor, António Guterres, is preparing what may be the final report on the crash, a documentary film has caused a stir by presenting what it has described as revelations.

The two-hour film, “Cold Case Hammarskjold,” by Mads Brugger, a Danish journalist, received mixed reviews when it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival last month. It suggested that a South African group of white mercenaries had not only played a role in the crash, but had also later plotted to infect South Africa’s black majority with AIDS through a fake vaccination campaign.

While the AIDS theory has been met with deep skepticism by a range of experts, its assertions about a South African mercenary connection to Mr. Hammarskjold’s death have not been dismissed so easily.

Dag Hammarskjold in 1959.CreditAssociated Press

A few weeks before the premiere of “Cold Case Hammarskjold,” Alexander Jones, a former member of the mercenary group and an important figure in the film, was interviewed for 90 minutes in Sweden by a representative of the jurist who is preparing the United Nations report, according to Andreas Rocksen, a producer of the film.

Mr. Jones described a 1989 recruitment session for the group, the South African Institute for Maritime Research, in which photographs of the Hammarskjold crash site had been displayed and the group’s leader “referred to it as one of the most successful operations — taking down a dignitary,” Mr. Rocksen said.

Asked for comment, the jurist, Mohamed Chande Othman, the former chief justice of Tanzania, said he had received “information from a multiplicity of sources,” including “the makers of a recent film on this subject matter,” according to an emailed statement from his spokesman.

The judge also said he was still evaluating the information “in terms of whether it may be new information of relevance” and that he intended to submit his report to Mr. Guterres by June.

Neither the judge nor Mr. Guterres said they had seen the film. But a spokesman for Mr. Guterres, Farhan Haq, said that Mr. Hammarskjold’s death “remains one of the saddest, most tragic events in the history of our organization,” and that “a full accounting of what happened is way overdue.”

The film’s researchers also claim to have corroborated a theory that a now-deceased Belgian mercenary pilot, Jan van Risseghem, flying a French-built Fouga Magister belonging to the forces of Moïse Tshombe, the Katangese rebel leader, attacked and destroyed Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane.

The researchers interviewed a friend of Mr. Risseghem’s, Pierre Coppens, who said Mr. Risseghem had recounted the attack to him years later in Belgium.

That account, however, has been called into question by a German historian, Torben Gülstorff, who has traced documents showing that several Dornier twin-engine planes were sold to the Katangese rebel authorities.

Unlike the Fouga, the Dornier Do 28A had short takeoff and landing capabilities and could have used a short airstrip in the Congolese town of Kipushi to reach Ndola, while a Fouga, based much further away in the Congolese town of Kolwezi, would have been at the limits of its range.

In an article last year, Mr. Gülstorff wrote that “a Dornier Do 28A might be the plane that was used in a nighttime air-to-air attack” on Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane. But he said, “further research is necessary.”

Doubt also has been expressed about Mr. van Risseghem’s whereabouts on the night of the crash. In 1994, Bengt Rösiö, a Swedish diplomat and author who had interviewed Mr. van Risseghem, said in a paper titled “Ndola Once Again” that Mr. van Risseghem was “not in Katanga at the time of the Ndola crash since he was on leave in Belgium.”

But that assertion, too, seems undermined by documents published in a Belgian newspaper, De Morgen, last month, showing that Mr. van Risseghem apparently drew an advance on his salary as a mercenary for the Katangese authorities on Sept. 16, 1961.

New questions also have been raised about the precise cause of the Albertina’s destruction. An article last month in Counterpunch, a magazine based in Petrolia, Calif., suggested that the pilot had been trying for a controlled crash landing after an attacking plane hit it.

If the Albertina had not struck an enormous anthill, the article said, the “skinny trees would probably have arrested its forward movement in a fairly short distance and the passengers if they were strapped in would have a pretty good chance of walking away.”

Some of those colonial officials present in Ndola at the time, representing Britain, insist that there was no evidence of an aerial attack.

“I mapped out where every body was found in relation to the crash site and attended every post mortem,” said John Gange, a former detective senior inspector in the colonial police who examined the site hours after it had been located.

“Every single scrap of the aircraft was removed from the scene and examined by qualified engineers,” Mr. Gange said in an email. “Nothing untoward was found.”

“No bullets or bullet holes were found on any of the bodies or on any part of the wreckage,” he added.

In the absence of any definitive explanation, conflicting theories have proliferated, along with accusations that Western powers and the United Nations itself have obstructed successive inquiries.

Last November, Judge Othman directly accused Britain and South Africa of having failed to cooperate in his repeated requests for information.

This month, Hynrich W. Wieschhoff, whose father, Heinrich A. Wieschhoff, an adviser to Mr. Hammarskjold, died in the crash, said the United Nations had “done little to publicize the activities” of Judge Othman, had been “slow to fully declassify its own archives and still refuses to release some documents.”

In an article posted on PassBlue, a news website that focuses on the United Nations, Mr. Wieschhoff said the judge’s final report may offer more detail. Still, he said, “unless that report or a new sense of purpose by the U.N. can pry the facts out of Britain, the U.S. and other key states, what happened and why will once again fade unanswered into the past.”

Do Spy Agencies Hold Answer to Dag Hammarskjold’s Death? U.N. Wants to Know.

By ALAN COWELL and RICK GLADSTONE The New York Times JULY 15, 2017

Whether the keepers of those archives will allow access remains an open question.

Mr. Hammarskjold, an iconic Swedish diplomat who was the second secretary general of the world body, died with 15 others when their plane, a chartered DC-6, crashed just after midnight on Sept. 18, 1961, minutes from its destination: an airfield in Ndola, in what was then the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia and is now Zambia.

The three official inquiries that immediately followed suggested pilot error was the cause, but the third of the reports, by the United Nations Commission of Investigation in 1962, said sabotage could not be ruled out. That possibility helped feed suspicions and conspiracy theories that Mr. Hammarskjold, 56 at the time of his death, had been assassinated.

Since then, independent investigators and academics have spent years collecting and scrutinizing evidence that had been dismissed or suppressed, bolstering the theory of foul play. In her 2011 book “Who Killed Hammarskjold?,” Susan Williams, a University of London scholar of African decolonization, concluded that “whatever the details, his death was almost certainly the result of a sinister intervention.”

A strong advocate of decolonization, Mr. Hammarskjold certainly had adversaries who felt threatened by his diplomacy. He died while on a visit to help end a secessionist war in newly independent Congo, a former Belgian colony rich with strategically vital minerals, including uranium, coveted by the world’s big powers.

It was a mission regarded with suspicion by powerful mining interests in Belgium and South Africa, as well as permanent members of the Security Council, including the United States and Britain. Mr. Hammarskjold’s work later earned him a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize.

The narrative of his final hours has been one of enduring fascination, laced with cryptic references to shadowy mercenaries, big-power machinations, airplanes parked on darkened runways and distant monitors tracking radio communications as the DC-6 made its fatal, final approach.

The crash came at a pivot in Africa’s fortunes between colonialism and independence, heralding an era when the Cold War split the continent, fueling guerrilla wars and uprisings — from Mozambique and Zimbabwe to Angola and Namibia — that reached their conclusions more than three decades later with the end of apartheid in South Africa.

Frustrated that a definitive answer to what exactly happened to Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane had never been established, his two most recent successors in the top role at the United Nations — Ban Ki-moon and António Guterres — have revitalized the inquiry.

A panel appointed by Mr. Ban found in 2015 that enough new tidbits of information had surfaced to warrant a new investigation. A General Assembly resolution last December authorized the appointment of an “eminent person” to review the information to determine the scope of any new inquiry.

That person, Mohamed Chande Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania, who also was the leader of Mr. Ban’s panel, is due to submit his findings in a report to Mr. Guterres this month.

Mr. Othman declined to speak about the findings ahead of submitting the report. But senior United Nations officials and other associates of Mr. Othman said he had compiled detailed new questions about intercepted radio communications and other aircraft in the area as Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane went down eight miles from Ndola’s airfield — and that the answers may be found in the intelligence archives of the United States, Britain and Belgium.

“We know from available information that they know much more than what they’re saying,” said one of the senior United Nations officials, referring to the government keepers of those archives. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a confidential United Nations report.

One theory is that the DC-6 may have been attacked or harassed by a French-built Fouga Magister fighter jet operated by secessionist forces in the southern Congolese province of Katanga, who were resisting Mr. Hammarskjold’s efforts to end their rebellion.

Seven months before the crash, three Fouga Magisters had been delivered to the secessionists aboard an American-owned cargo plane that was supposed to be delivering food. President John F. Kennedy was deeply embarrassed by the delivery, which was later reported to have been a C.I.A. operation.

Whether a Fouga was in the Ndola area on the night of the crash remains unknown, despite earlier assurances to Mr. Othman from the C.I.A. that it had no records of a fighter jet’s presence there, a senior United Nations official said.

Mr. Othman has also put new questions to Britain and Belgium about the findings of their own intelligence services. Essentially, the senior United Nations official said, Mr. Othman had asked Western governments to carry out “more exhaustive searches and comprehensive searches” through their archives.

His inquiries also include questions about two American military intelligence officials at different listening posts on the night of the crash, one of whom has since died. Both claimed years later to have overheard radio intercepts that suggested the DC-6 had been shot down. Mr. Othman has also inquired about whether an official American DC-3 aircraft had been parked at the Ndola airfield that night.

As the deadline approached for Mr. Othman to submit his report, it was unclear what kind of information, if any, the intelligence services of these countries had released in response to his requests.

Officials of the National Security Agency in the United States referred inquiries about Mr. Othman to the State Department, which had no immediate comment.

Britain’s Foreign Office said in a statement that “we conducted another search and are providing him with further material,” referring to Mr. Othman. It did not specify the substance of the material but said “we believe all information of direct value to the inquiry has been released.”

There had been some hope that Belgium’s intelligence services would help Mr. Othman after a member of the country’s Parliament, Benoit Hellings, publicly raised the issue with the Justice Ministry last year.

But Mr. Hellings said in an interview that some of Belgium’s archives — particularly from its colonial secret service — remain classified. He has called for all of the archives to be made public as part of Belgium’s reckoning with its colonial past and said he intended to press the matter further.

The Belgium connection is potentially important because of unverified information that Belgian mercenaries had been operating in the Ndola area — including a Belgian pilot who may have been operating the secessionists’ Fouga Magister.

“I just want to know the truth, and when you have some archives, it’s normal to give access to people from the science world, and especially from the U.N.,” Mr. Hellings said. “We are talking about the death of a secretary general, so it’s a fairly important topic.”

Mr. Othman also reached out to Goran Bjorkdahl, a Swedish aid worker and development expert based in Africa, who had conducted his own investigation from 2008 to 2011 after learning that his father, who was in Zambia in the 1970s, had been given a fragment of Mr. Hammarskjold’s wrecked aircraft by local villagers.

The investigation by Mr. Bjorkdahl suggested the plane had been shot down as it was approaching Ndola. That conclusion was based on interviews he conducted with residents of the Ndola area, who said they had seen a second smaller aircraft, but had never been asked to provide testimony for any official inquiry.

New versions of what happened that night and additional allegations in the Hammarskjold mystery, many of them uncorroborated, have continued to emerge, further complicating Mr. Othman’s effort to sift fact from fiction.

Tom Miller, an American journalist based in Arizona, said he had provided Mr. Othman access to notes he had made after a series of meetings, the last in 1975, with a British mercenary who described what he called a C.I.A.-backed conspiracy to ensure that Mr. Hammarskjold’s plane crashed by falsifying altitudes on the crew’s aviation charts, causing the pilot to fly much too low.

The two official inquiries by the Rhodesian civil aviation authorities immediately after the crash found that the plane had descended too low. The United Nations Commission of Inquiry report found the plane crashed in an area just 200 feet higher than the Ndola airfield’s altitude.

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MULTIPLE ARTICLES RELATED: https://aarclibrary.org/?s=Dag+Hammarskjold

30 December 2022: Mandate to renew the UN Investigation into the death of UNSG Hammarskjöld

Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961.

Courtesy of Susan Williams:

On 30 December 2022, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution A/77/L.31, which authorises the renewal of the UN’s ‘Investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him.’ It further authorises the reappointment of the Eminent Person, Judge Mohamed Chande Othman, to lead the investigation.

The Resolution was initiated by Sweden and co-sponsored by 141 Member States (out of 193). The US and the UK did not co-sponsor the resolution.

The Resolution follows Judge Othman’s latest report (A/76/892), which is readily available on the UNA Westminster webpages on developments relating to the Hammarskjöld plane crash (along with various other significant documents and updates).

In this latest report, Judge Othman writes:

‘…I respectfully submit that the burden of proof to conduct a full review of records and archives resulting in full disclosure has not been discharged at the present time. Indeed, information received from other sources under the present mandate underscores that it is almost certain that these Member States [that is to say, the USA, the UK, and South Africa] created, held or were otherwise aware of specific and important information regarding the cause of the tragic event. That information is yet to be disclosed.’

In case of interest, the passing of the Resolution by the GA can be watched on UNTV. It takes about three minutes from 1.04.40: https://media.un.org/en/asset/k14/k14tlsg06p

RELATED:

Do Spy Agencies Hold Answer to Dag Hammarskjold’s Death? U.N. Wants to Know

Investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him

Cold Case Hammarskjöld

United Nations Secretary General, Dag_Hammarskjöld

In September 1961, UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane mysteriously and fatally crashed while flying over African soil. With Hammarskjöld on his way to mediate tensions and defend Congo’s independence-contrary to the interests of Europe’s mining corporations-the crash was thought by many to be an assassination. As Cold Case Hammarskjöld director Mads Brügger (The Red Chapel, The Ambassador) begins to investigate the case with fresh eyes over 50 years later, he uncovers a conspiracy more sinister than anything he’d initially imagined. Brügger leads viewers down a wild investigative rabbit hole, and after scores of false starts, dead ends, and elusive interviews, Brügger and his private investigator sidekick begin to uncover secrets that could upturn history. This thrilling documentary challenges expectations of the genre and calls the fundamental nature of truth into question.

Watch the Official Trailer Here

Rent the film for $6.99 on YouTube

Search Results for: Dag Hammarskjold

United Nations General Assembly

Letter dated 25 August 2022 from the Secretary-General addressed to the President of the General Assembly

Visit Magnolia Pictures CCH website at https://www.coldcasehammarskjold.com/