UN chief urges member states to disclose information concerning death of Dag Hammarskjold

The UN chief has urged member states to disclose, declassify or allow access to information related to the tragic plane crash in 1961 that killed former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said here Tuesday.

Dujarric said in a statement that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also urged member states to actively assist Mohamed Othman, former chief justice of Tanzania, in his work as the Eminent Person looking into the causes of those deaths.

"The secretary-general affirms his own commitment to this matter in the strongest terms as he strongly feels that he owes it to his illustrious and distinguished predecessor, Dag Hammarskjold, and to the other members of the party accompanying him and to their families, to pursue the full truth of this matter," said the statement.

Othman was chair of the 2015 Independent Panel of Experts, which concluded that there was significant new information with sufficient probative value to further pursue aerial attack or other interference as a hypothesis of the possible cause of the crash.

The Eminent Person's mandate is to review potential new information, assess its probative value, and determine the scope that any further investigation should take. The mandate also allows him to potentially draw conclusions from the investigations already conducted in the past.

Othman has noted that more active cooperation is necessary from member states to declassify or otherwise allow access to records that are now over 55 years old, Dujarric said at a daily news briefing here.

Hammarskjold, who was a Swedish diplomat, served as the second UN secretary-general from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash in September 1961. Endit