Plane crash that killed UN boss 'may have been
caused by aircraft attack'
Exclusive: US and UK intercepts could hold answer to
1961 accident in Africa that killed Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others
The scattered wreckage of the
Douglas DC-6 carrying Dag Hammarskjöld in a forest near Ndola, Zambia.
Photograph: AP
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Julian BorgerWorld affairs editor
Tuesday 26 September 2017 10.41 BSTLast modified on
Tuesday 26 September 2017 22.00 BST
A UN report into
the death of its former secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld in
a 1961 plane crash in central Africa has found that there is a “significant
amount of evidence” that his flight was brought down by another aircraft.
The report,
delivered to the current secretary general, António Guterres, last month, took
into account previously undisclosed information provided by the US, UK,
Belgian, Canadian and German governments.
Its author,
Mohamed Chande Othman, a former Tanzanian chief justice, found that the US and
UK governments had intercepted radio traffic in the area at the time and
suggested that the 56-year-old mystery could be solved if the contents of those
classified recordings were produced.
“I am indebted for
the assistance that I received, which uncovered a large amount of valuable new
information,” Othman said in an executive summary of his report, seen by the
Guardian. “I can confidently state that the deeper we have gone into the
searches, the more relevant information has been found.”
Dag Hammarskjöld was on a
mission to try to broker peace in Congo when he died in 1961. Photograph: REX
Hammarskjöld, a
Swedish diplomat who became the UN secretary general in 1953, was on a mission
in September 1961 to try to broker peace in Congo, where the Katanga region had
staged a rebellion, backed by mining interests and European mercenaries,
against the newly independent government in Kinshasa.
His plane, a
Douglas DC-6, was on the way from Kinshasa to the town of Ndola in Northern
Rhodesia (now Zambia), where the British colonial authorities were due to host
talks with the Katanga rebels. It was approaching the airstrip at about
midnight on 17 September when it crashed, killing Hammarskjöld and 15 others on
board.
Two inquiries run
by the British pointed to pilot error as the cause, while a UN commission in
1962 reached an open verdict. In recent years, independent research by Göran Björkdahl, a
Swedish aid worker, and Susan Williams, a senior fellow at the Institute of
Commonwealth Studies in London and author of a 2011 book Who Killed Hammarskjöld?,
persuaded the UN to reopen the case. A panel convened in 2015 found there was
enough new material to warrant the appointment of an “eminent person” to assess
it. Othman was given the job in
February this year.
Among Othman’s new
findings are:
- In February 1961, the French secretly
supplied three Fouga warplanes to the Katanga rebels, “against the
objections of the US government”. Contrary to previous findings, they were
used in air-to-air attacks, flown at night and from unpaved airstrips in
Katanga.
- Fresh evidence bolsters an account by a
French diplomat, Claude de Kemoularia, that he had been told in 1967 by a
Belgian pilot known as Beukels, who had been flying for the rebels as a
mercenary, that he had fired warning shots to try to divert the plane away
from Ndola and accidentally clipped its wing. Othman said he was unable
establish Beukels’ identity in the time available for his inquiry.
- The UK and Rhodesian authorities were
intercepting UN communications at the time of the crash and had
intelligence operatives in the area. The UK should therefore have
potentially crucial evidence in its classified archives
- The US had sophisticated electronic
surveillance aircraft “in and around Ndola” as well as spies, and defence
officials, on the night of the crash, and Washington should be able to
provide more detailed information.
Othman found that
earlier inquiries had disregarded the testimony of local witnesses who said
they saw another plane and flashes in the sky on the night of Hammarskjold’s
crash. They had also “undervalued” the testimony of Harold Julien, a security
officer who survived for several days who told medical staff he had seen
“sparks in the sky” shortly before the DC-6, known by its registration number
SE-BDY, fell out of the sky.
“Based on the
totality of the information we have at hand, it appears plausible that external
attack or threat may have been a cause of the crash, whether by way of direct
attack causing SE-BDY to crash, or by causing a momentary distraction of the
pilots,” Othman concludes.
“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. In its totality, this evidence
is not easily dismissed.”
Othman argues that
the “burden of proof” was now on member states “to show that they have
conducted a full review of records and archives in their custody or possession,
including those that remain classified, for potentially relevant information”.
The Tanzanian
judge said that the most relevant pieces of information were radio intercepts
and called for countries likely to have relevant information, such as the UK
and US, to appoint an “independent and high-ranking official” to comb the
archives.
“Any such
information regarding what occurred during the last minutes of SE-BDY, if
verifiable, will be likely to either prove or disprove one or more of the
existing hypotheses, bringing us more proximate to closure,” Othman writes.
“This is a step
that must be taken before this matter, and the memories of those who perished
on flight SE-BDY in the service of the organisation, may rest.”
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