Who killed Dag Hammarskjöld?

Was UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold assassinated in 1961 and, if so, by whom? By white politicians in southern Africa who feared his political influence threatened their power or by the Western governments that murdered Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba a few months earlier–for which act Belgium subsequently apologised? Or perhaps by a combination of the two forces, acting in cahoots?

They are the questions behind an independent commission of inquiry which has been set up by an "enabling committee" whose members include the dull but serious former head of the Commonwealth Secretariat,Chief Emeka Anyaoku of Nigeria.

There have been three inquiries into the plane crash in which "the best Secretary General to have led the United Nations" died, though one was by the then white-rule Southern Rhodesian government (which, for example, virtually ignored African eyewitnesses), and is therefore intrinsically untrustworthy.

“Pilot error” is the default finding of most aviation accident inquiries, because it avoids the potentially costly implications of technical or management failure, and this has been the official line with the Hammarskjöld investigations. But many awkward questions have never been resolved, and they were crystallised and added to in a book, "Who killed Hammarskjöld? The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa", by Susan Williams of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London. Williams is on the enabling committee that is now looking for more money to finance it.

After half a century, it will be difficult, in the words of Dr K.G. Hammar, former Archbishop of Sweden, to “finally clear this matter up”, but if there’s new evidence or different perspectives on old evidence, it’s worth a try.