Plane crash that killed UN boss ‘may have been caused by aircraft attack’

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While I am concinved MH17 was shot down by a Russia supplied BUK TELAR, there are still many questions unanswered. MH17 is one of quite a few aviation mysteries. For example the shot down of the Itavia DC9, the Smolensk Tu154 crash and MH370.

In 1961 a Douglas DC6 aircraft carring UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjöld crashed over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).  A British-run commission of inquiry blamed the crash in 1961 on pilot error and a later UN investigation largely rubber-stamped its findings. They ignored or downplayed witness testimony of villagers near the crash site which suggested foul play.

Dag Hammarskjöld  is the person to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize after his death, he established the first armed UN peacekeeping mission following the crisis in Suez.

Swedish aid worker Goran Bjorkdahl has carried out extensive research. British academic Susan Williams published a book in 2011 titled – Who Killed Hammarskjold? Both conclude that it is likely the plane was brought down.

The aircraft could have been shot down to kill Hammarskjöld. There were a range of people, including white Rhodesians and the Belgian and British mining companies in Katanga, “with a sense of being at war with the UN and with African nationalism”,Susan Williams  says – and with a motive for preventing Mr Hammarskjold and Mr Tshombe reaching a negotiated settlement.

The Guardian in 2011 reported about eyewitnesses which claim a second aircraft fired at the plane raising questions of British cover-up over the 1961 crash and its causes.

At September 26, 2017 the Guardian again reports about this crash. The newspaper was able to read a yet secret report written by Mohamed Chande Othman, former Chief Justice of Tanzania. The 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.

Likely the aircraft was accidently shot down. Some 30 years after the crash, in 1992, two men who had served as UN representatives in Katanga just before and just after Hammarskjold’s death – Conor Cruise O’Brien and George Ivan Smith – wrote a letter to the Guardian claiming to have evidence that the plane was shot down accidentally, by mercenaries. In their view, a warning shot intended to divert the plane to alternative talks with industrialists in Katanga, in fact hit the plane and caused it to crash.

BBC reported in 2011 about the likely shot down here. 

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