Article Defamed Hammarskjoeld

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30882, 15 October 1965, Page 17

Article Defamed Hammarskjoeld

(N Z P A Reuter —Copyright) MALMOE (Sweden), October 14. The brother of Dag Hanmiarskjoeld was awarded £670 damages yesterday for a newspaper ar tic 1 e which said the former United Nations Secre-tary-General committed suicide by planting a bomb aboard his plane.

A Court ruling said the article constituted “a violation of the peace that should belong to the dead” and thus could be considered defamation of the dead.

The chief editor of the newspaper “Sydsvenska Dagbladet,” was ordered to pay

the damages to Mr Hammarskjoeld's brother, Sven, who originally claimed damages of £6700. The editor, Mr Nils Ivar Ivarsson, was also ordered to pay “day fines,” sums imposed according to the defendant’s salary and not publicly disclosed.

Mr Dag Hammarskjoeld died in a plane crash in what was then Northern Rhodesia in 1961, while on a Congo peace mission. The seven-man jury also condemned an allegation that Mr Hammarskjoeld had suffered from hallucinations that he was Christ. Mr Ivarsson pleaded that the material had been previously published and was therefore privileged.

A Swedish woman has said in an interview published in Stockholm that she intends to write a

book based on love letters sent to her by Dag Hammarskjoeld. Mrs Inga Ehrstroem told the mass-circulation newspaper “Aftonbladet” she was the “only great love” in his life. Mrs Ehrstroem said the love letters were written between 1935 and 1937, when both were students in Sweden.

She spoke of the influence religion had oh Mr Hammarskjoeld’s life and claimed he wrote in one letter: “1 think 1 was 12 years old when I had a very strong feeling that 1 am a new Jesus.”

All the letters were typed, she said, and some were signed with the cross in a circle. “Often he wrote of how meaningless life was,” she added. *

Mrs Ehrstroem said: “My ambition is to give a true picture of a young, searching

person—a person whose memory should be held in honour and not, as now, often the subject of mud-throwing.”