Swedish diplomat and United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld died in a plane explosion, 18 September 1961, over Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

An international commission of retired judges, including Sir Stephen Sedley and Sir Richard Goldstone, was established by the United Nations in February 2014. It has appealed to the United States to declassify several documents, including the NSA radio intercepts.

The document released is a cable from the U.S. ambassador to the Congo, Ed Gullion. Therein, the diplomat identifies as Jan van Risseghem the mercenary who, in all likelihood, was piloting the plane that destroyed in flight the one that was carrying the UN Secretary General.

In 2011, The Guardian published the testimony of a man who saw Dag Hammarskjöld’s being shot down. Then, a book by Susan Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjold? : The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa, provided further insight.

It seems that the UN Secretary General was killed by a coalition of the Rhodesian apartheid establishement and Anglo-American diplomats, worried that the great powers might lose their foothold in Africa. Dag Hammarskjöld was on his way to authorize a military operation in the Congo defying the will of Washington and London.

“Dag Hammarskjöld: evidence suggests UN chief’s plane was shot down”, par Julian Borger et Georgina Smith, The Guardian, 17 août 2011.