Mercenaries accused of killing U.N. chief

Press, 28 May 1980, Page 23

Mercenaries accused of killing U.N. chief

Swedish investigators claim to have uncovered evidence that a former United Nations Secretary, General Dag Hammarskjold, died during the Congo conflict in 1961 as the result of a Katangese mercenary’ attack. The new facts suggest that his plane was “bombed” from another aircraft, using a canister of TNT triggered by a handgrenade. The motive was hatred for Hammarskjold, whose Congo peace mission was seen by mercenaries and white reactionaries as a threat to their livelihood and future. Hammarskjold and his colleagues on the peace mission died when their plane crashed at Ndala in Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. Despite suspicions of a plot, U.N. and Rhodesian inquiries were inconclusive. Chief architect of the new theory is Bo Virving, former chief engineer of Tansair, the company that owned the crashed plane. Virving took part in the original on-site inquiries. His theory is supported by highly qualified specialists in a series of programmes to be shown on Swedish television.

The producer, Gunnar Mollerstedt, spent a year gathering material. He interviewed African witnesses who say they saw two aircraft flying closely together at the time af the disaster, and gave other pointers to an aerial attack. . Other witnesses include Bengt Rosio, now Swedish Ambassador in Prague, who in 1961 was Swedish Consul-General in the Congo; Captain Lars-Erik Starck, a Transair pilot in the Congo; Sven Mattson, a Swedish trade union representative; and Rolf Mellstrom, the engineer who completed checks on Hammarskjold’s plane before it took off from Leopoldville. Central to the inquiry is the Union Miniere, the Belgian industrial giant that backed the secession of mineral-rich Katanga from the newly' independent Congo — now Zaire — one of the events that led the Congo to call in U.N. forces.

Union Miniere. wittingly or unwittingly, became the

main supplier of moral and material support to mercenaries of the secessionist Katangese President Moise Tshombe. The television programme establishes the existence in 1961 of a Katangese air force and its receipt, directly from Union Miniere. of materials for making bombs and arming aircraft. In September, 1961, after -an unsuccessful attempt to round up the mercenaries, fighting broke out between U.N. and ■ Katangese forces.

Hammarskjold decided he had to get Tshombe away from the . European advisers who dominated him at the Katangese capital, Elisabethville. Ndola was selected as the meeting place. About midnight (local time) on September 17, Hammarskjold’s aircraft flew high over Ndola airport and then away to make a landing turn. In the next four minutes something occurred which caused it to crash nine miles from the airport.

Several witnesses testify to the insecurity felt by the mercenaries at the time of Hanunarskjold’s mission.

Rosio notes that Union Miniere, Belgium. and probably Tshombe himself realised that the secession could not be prolonged. Tshombe felt trapped by his own mercenaries. However, he says, there was a hard-core of “reac-tionary-die-hard, politically ignorant Europeans,” ready to go it alone, and some 170 mercenaries whom peace would make redundant.

Rosio says that when he arrived at Ndola the day after the crash, he found “raw flaming hate” against the U.N. “It was so deep that a number of persons could have gone very far to take revenge.” Sven Mattson, the trade

unionist, was in the bush near Ndola advising charcoal burners about setting up a co-operative. Weeks after the crash the men’s leader told him that some of them had seen aircraft and flashes in the sky at the time of the crash, but had been too scared to come forward. One of the charcoal burners was Dixon Bulent. The TV producer found him last year and filmed an interview. His memory remains clear: ' “When (Hammarskjold’s plane) turned back it wen: to-

wards Zaire. The small airplane was falling on to the top of the big one. We saw that the small one felled (sic) something like fire on top of it.”

Another witness who saw two aircraft was T. J. Kankasa, secretary of an African township which lay beneath the plane’s flight path. He had done national . service in the Rhodesian Air Force and later became a Zambian Government Minister.

In the programme he says: “What I saw that night was a big plane circling, and thereafter a small plane which interfered with the big plane. I have no doubt in my mind that I saw the plane I had some friends with me. We saw a second plane which I sincerely believe interfered with the big plane. Minutes later there w T as a thunderous sound.”

Between September 3, when Hammarskjold arrived in the Congo from New York and September 17, when he took off for'

Ndola. the Katangese air force was attacking U.N. positions. In the programme, Captain Starck is asked if, when flying for the U.N., his own plane had ever come under attack. Yes, he says. The attacks -were intensifying just before Hammarskjold died. Two days before the crash, he was attacked by Katangese aircraft using guns and light bombs near Kamina.

Samples of bombs were subsequently found at Jadotville. A diagram illustrates a device which consists of a cast-iron canister the size of a 2 lb. coffee tin,’filled with TNT. The triggering device, a hand-grenade, was set into the explosive, with the pin at the top. A bomber would pull the pin and release the can, leaving five seconds for the explosion. In the night sky the flash would be consistent with the “something like fire” referred to by the witness, Buleni. A flash and a bang were also mentioned by the sole- survivor of the crash, Hammarskjold’s bodyguard Sergent Julien, in a moment of consciousness before he died. Virving and Starck discuss the effect of a small bomb bursting near an aircraft preparing to land. Virving says the plane need not actually have been hit. The flash alone could have disturbed the pilot. Or an explosion a few yards away could have dislodged vital control wires from their pulleys.

There are still unexplained questions about 'lammarskjold’s death, but a clear indication of what he experts suspect is given at the end of the programme by Rosio. In a strongly personal note, he says: “Perhaps one day some man, in the name of God, will want to ease the burden of his conscience and confess to what happened over Ndola that night"

GEORGE IVAN SMITH, who wrote this article for the “Observer.” then a senior Australian United Nations official ,was sent to Africa by Dag Hammerskjold in 1960. Hammerskjold's successor, U Thant, appointed him to be his personal representative in the Congo and from 1961 in East, Central, and Southern Africa.