Revisiting Dag Hammarskjöld’s Mysterious Death, yalereview.org

Susan Williams, historian and Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London

Shortly after midnight on September 17–18, 1961, a DC-6 aircraft flying from Leopoldville (Kinshasa), the cap­ital of the newly independent Congo, plunged into dense forest in central Africa. The crash occurred about nine miles from the town of Ndola in Northern Rhodesia, then a British colonial territory (now Zambia). It was a moonlit night with a slight haze and no cloud, and the weather was fine. […]

The commission recommended that the U.N. re-open an earlier investigation into what had happened to Hammarskjöld’s plane.

That recommendation was taken up. In December 2014, the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for a fresh investiga­tion into Hammarskjöld’s death. The U.N. Secretary General then appointed the Honourable Mohamed Chande Othman, the former Chief Justice of Tanzania, to lead the inquiry, which is ongoing. Over the course of this inquiry, Justice Othman has paid new atten­tion to evidence that was dismissed in earlier decades and discov­ered new information. In his last three reports he has written that “it appears plausible that an external attack or threat may have been a cause of the crash.” Läs artikel