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.
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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.
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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 Othmans 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 Hammarskjolds 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.
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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.
