Noting Significant New Information Has Been Provided, Secretary-General Transmits Eminent Person’s Report on Investigation into Dag Hammarskjöld’s Death
The following statement was issued today by the Spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres:
The Secretary-General has transmitted to the President of the General Assembly the report of the Eminent Person, former Chief Justice of the United Republic of Tanzania, Mohamed Chande Othman, concerning the investigation into the conditions and circumstances resulting in the tragic death of Dag Hammarskjöld and of the members of the party accompanying him. The Secretary-General’s letter to the President of the General Assembly is accompanied by the Eminent Person’s report and will be publicly available as General Assembly document A/78/1006.
Dag Hammarskjöld served as Secretary-General from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in Ndola, Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, along with 15 others, UN staff members and crew, on the night of 17/18 September 1961. The Secretary-General pays tribute to all those that died and emphasizes that their families deserve answers.
The Secretary-General is grateful to Judge Othman for his unwavering commitment to this matter and is encouraged that the body of relevant knowledge has grown with each successive mandate of the Eminent Person. He notes that significant new information has been provided to the Eminent Person during his present mandate, including in the areas of: (i) probable intercepts by Member States of relevant communications; (ii) the capacity of the armed forces of Katanga, or others, to have conducted a possible attack on flight SE-BDY; (iii) the presence in the area of foreign paramilitary and intelligence personnel; and (iv) further new information relevant to the context and surrounding events of 1961.
At this juncture, the Eminent Person assesses it to remain plausible that an external attack or threat was a cause of the crash. The Eminent Person notes that the alternative hypotheses that appear to remain available are that the crash resulted from sabotage, or unintentional human error.
The Secretary-General is encouraged by the disclosure of new information by some Member States and by some key Member States’ continued commitment to engage with the Eminent Person. He is also grateful for the cooperation and collaboration by Independent Appointees of Member States, as well as individual researchers.
The Secretary-General notes that the Eminent Person considers that it is almost certain that specific, crucial and to date undisclosed information exists in the archives of Member States. The Secretary-General further notes the Eminent Person’s assessment that he has not received, to date, specific responses to his specific queries from certain Member States. The Secretary-General has personally followed up on the Eminent Person’s outstanding requests for information, and calls upon Member States to release any relevant records in their possession.
With significant progress having been made, the Secretary-General calls on all of us to renew our resolve and commitment to pursue the full truth of what happened on that fateful night in 1961.