December 15, 2014 - The United Nations has come
under public pressure to look into the death of
former UN Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjold.
On September 18, 1961, the plane UN Secretary
General Hammarskjold and his staff were flying
in crashed near Ndola
Airport,
Zambia (at the time called Northern Rhodesia, a British territory).
Hammarskjöld was enroute to the
Congo
to negotiate a cease-fire between Katangese
troops of Moise Tshombe (the French) and UN
forces in a Douglas DC-6B, c/n 43559/251,
registered in Sweden as
SE-BDY, when it crashed.
The circumstances around the DC-6B plane crash
and the deaths of 15 others onboard were never
clear. The initial reports offered no
information on the cause of the crash. However,
there were conflicting reports that the plane
crashed due to pilot error, the Secretary
General's body guards were shot onboard, and
that the plane was shot down.
In 2011, a Swedish aid worker, Goran Bjorkdahl
wrote that the DC-6B was shot down because
privately owned mining companies such as Union
Miniere, a Belgian mining company benefited from
the war and that cease-fire would result in
those companies becoming state owned.
These companies mined copper, cobalt, tin,
uranium and zinc. Union Miniere was providing
75% of world's production at the time. The
uranium that was used for the atomic bomb ("Little
Boy") by the United States was bought from Union
Miniere.
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