What happened to Dag Hammarskold?

I don’t know much about the man, except that he was Secretary General of the UN and a highly regarded statesman. I think he was Swedish.

He traveled to Africa at the time of the Katanga secession (I think – I am dredging up old and faded memories here).

After some time in talks in Kinshasa (Leopoldville) he flew in his UN DC-6 down to Zambia (Northern Rhodesia). The plane was slightly damaged from small arms fire, but seemed fairly airworthy. Anyway, it crashed in bush near the Zambian town of Ndola. He was apparently still alive after the crash, but natives ignored him and pilfered supplies from the wreck.

There is a memorial to him near Ndola. I visited it briefly last year and took some pics. I had missed Kofi Annan’s visit by about a week! Drat!

Anyway – what do you think actually happened? Was it a technical fault? Bad piloting? Bad ATC? Or was the aircraft shot down? There had been reports of MiG’s flying about in the area.

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