A prominent jurist investigating the mysterious 1961 plane crash that killed the United Nations secretary general, Dag Hammarskjold, in southern Africa has concluded that the aircraft may have been attacked, and that four nations — Britain, Russia, South Africa and the United States — may be withholding information that could solve the puzzle.
The jurist, Mohamed Chande Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania, issued his conclusions in a 95-page report posted Monday on the website of the United Nations, which retained him nearly three years ago to help sift through new evidence and a range of sinister theories that have proliferated in the decades since the crash. […]
In his final report, Mr. Othman wrote that the attack hypothesis “remained plausible,” and that the burden of proof he had assigned to member states had “yet to be fully discharged.”
Last year Mr. Othman asked 14 countries to each appoint an independent official to review intelligence, security and defense archives for information related to the disaster. He wrote in the new report that his interactions with those countries and their appointees had since been “largely successful.”
But Mr. Othman also emphasized that certain countries — notably the United States, South Africa, Britain and Russia — “may yet have work to complete to ensure that comprehensive searches are conducted with a sufficient degree of transparency.” Läs artikel