UN to investigate 1961 plane crash that killed UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjold

Charles Southall, now 80, was a naval aviator in 1961 who worked at a signals intelligence base in Cyprus. Over the years he has told several researchers and writers that he heard an exchange between the pilot of a fighter jet and the pilot’s ground control, describing the shooting down of the DC-6.

Southall’s recollections were quoted in a UN report published in 2013. He confirmed the account in an e-mail to the Times.

Paul Henry Abram, now 73, was a Russian-speaking Air Force expert who was assigned to the NSA to monitor radio traffic among ground forces serving with the UN. He was stationed 400 miles away at Iraklion, Greece, and he, too, was on duty listening to high-frequency radio transmissions from central Africa.

Abram, now a lawyer and author, confirmed to the Times that he heard radio exchanges similar to those heard by Southall. He has never shared his recollections with Southall, and was never contacted by any official inquiries into Mr. Hammarskjold’s death.

The accounts by Southall and Abram, and one by a Belgian pilot named Beukels, who is quoted in Williams’s book as saying that he shot the plane down by accident as it was approaching Ndola after trying to force the pilots to divert to another airstrip, were never independently verified.

Hammarskjold was flying to Ndola from Léopoldville, now called Kinshasa, the capital of Congo, in an effort to broker an end to the secession of Katanga and the fighting between Katanga forces – most of them South African and European mercenaries – and Congolese forces.

There were also questions raised about the delay of about fifteen hours between the crash and the time the plane wreckage was found.

One of those participating in the search for the missing plane, Squadron Leader John Mussell of the Royal Rhodesian Air Force, dismisses conspiracy theories about the delay. Now 81 and living in retirement in Wales, Mussell acknowledged that early searches were “directed to the wrong area,” but he rejected “any thought that we, in the Air Force, were not on our toes, and further, as conspiracy theories would hint, were in some way involved in the disaster.”

He said in a telephone interview with the Times that the new UN inquiry should consider the role of the pilots of Hammarskjold’s plane. “It doesn’t matter how fatigued you are or how experienced you are,” he said. “If you are in Africa and going into unfamiliar territory, it’s not difficult to make a serious mistake.”

The Rhodesian civil aviation authorities conducted an inquiry shortly after the crash, and concluded that the plane had descended too low, and that neither pilot error nor foul play could be ruled out. A Rhodesian public inquiry, conducted in 1962, pointed to low altitude as the cause of the crash. A UN inquiry the same year reviewed a range of possible causes without identifying one factor.

Still, a 2013 UN panel, after reviewing all the evidence and testimonies of inquiries conducted in the last five decades, found that there was “persuasive evidence that the aircraft was subjected to some form of attack or threat as it circled to land.”

Jan Eliasson, deputy secretary general of the United Nations, told the Times that so much time has passed, that the new inquiry “is probably our last chance” to find the truth. “The more clarity we have on this tragedy, the better,” he said.