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Article: The Strange Death of Dag Hammarskjold.(airplane accident)
- Article from:
- History Today
- Article date:
- October 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 History Today Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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RECENTLY RELEASED -- and hitherto unseen -- private papers and tapes left to the Bodleian Library reveal a remarkable tale about the death in 1961 of the UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold. The documents were bequeathed by the Australian diplomat George Ivan Smith, who worked for the UN in the Congo in the 1960s. In September 1961 Hammarskjold's four-engine DC-6 aeroplane took off from the capital of the former Belgian Congo, Leopoldville, bound for Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (then part of the British-run Central African Federation). The plane never arrived. Just after midnight local time on the September 17th-18th, it ploughed into trees in rough bushland several ...