This is huge: British-trained Belgian mercenary admitted the killing of UN Secy General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961
Jan van Risseghem was
only a teenager when his mother ordered him to flee Nazi-occupied Belgium for
her native England with his brother Maurice. After hiding in a convent, and an
epic journey across the war-torn continent, they reached safety in Portugal,
then took a ship north. Once in England, the
pair signed up with the Belgian resistance, and with the help of an uncle
enrolled for flight training with the RAF, a decision that shaped not just
their war, but the rest of their lives.
Half a century later,
flying skills he learned in Britain would also make the younger van Risseghem
internationally notorious, when he was publicly linked to the plane crash that
killed Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld,
the UN secretary general, in 1961. His plane, the
Albertina, came down in forest just outside the town of Ndola in
present-day Zambia,
then Northern Rhodesia, just after midnight on 18 September, as it approached
the town’s airport.
Fifteen people on
board died immediately, and the only survivor in hospital a few days later. The
same day, a US ambassador sent a secret cable – one that stayed buried in files
for decades – speculating about possible sabotage and apparently naming Van Risseghem as a suspect. But his name would not
be connected with Hammarskjöld’s in public until many years later, after the
Belgian pilot had returned to his quiet hometown of Lint with his British wife,
raised two sons and mourned the death of one, retired, and then died a war hero
himself. This may be because,
as the initial shock and suspicions about Hammarskjöld’s death gradually faded,
so too did interest in the crash.
Rumours about why the
plane came down were fuelled by no less a figure than former US president Harry
Truman. He told reporters two days after Hammarskjöld’s death that the UN
leader “was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice
that I said ‘when they killed him.’”
He refused to
elaborate, but it was the start of decades of suspicions that western
governments were not sharing all the information they held about the crash.
Separate inquiries – including one by the UN, and another by
Hammarskjöld’s native Sweden – failed to provide a compelling explanation of
what happened, all blaming pilot error or reaching an open verdict. It took nearly 50
years, and publication of a
damning book by academic Susan Williams, Who
Killed Hammarskjöld?, for the UN to start asking that same question
again, rekindling doubts about the attack from conspiracy theorists who had
picked over it for decades.
Among the critical
evidence gathered by Williams and independent researcher Göran Björkdahl is
testimony from a former US spy, posted to a listening station in Cyprus, who
heard a recording of a pilot apparently narrating the attack as it unfolded,
transmitted just minutes after it happened.
It matches accounts
collected from Zambian witnesses living around the crash site, who said they
had seen a second aircraft near Hammarskjöld’s plane and unusual
lights and sounds in the sky. They had been largely ignored by white officials
working on the early inquiries. The sole immediate survivor of the crash also
described some kind of aerial attack, involving “sparks in the air” before he
died a week after the crash. Doctors said he was lucid at the time, but his
testimony had also been largely ignored.
Mining intrigue: Hammarskjöld’s death
happened amid a post-colonial race for resources in Africa. On his final
flight, he was heading for a secret meeting to broker an end to the civil war
in recently independent Congo, mineral-rich and on the brink of collapse... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/12/former-raf-pilot-shot-down-un-chief-dag-hammarskjold-1961-planeChile
