DOCUMENTED HISTORY
Bjørn Egge and the death of Dag Hammarskjöld
Sent to Ndola
After the crash on 18 September 1961, Egge was ordered from the UN operation in the Congo to Ndola. In his memoir, he says his assignment was to help identify the dead and recover the Secretary-General’s documents and hand-operated cipher machine. He describes gunfire as the liaison aircraft took off from Elisabethville (A Warrior for Peace, pp. 250–251).
What Egge observed
Egge writes that he saw Hammarskjöld’s body at the hospital and noticed a round mark on the forehead and a broken foot. This is his testimony, not proof of a gunshot wound or a particular cause of the crash. UN report A/68/800, paragraph 8.7, records his observation and discusses an alternative explanation for marks in the autopsy photographs.
Questions that remain
Egge himself wrote that decisive evidence of sabotage or a shoot-down was missing. The 2024 UN report A/78/1006 continues to regard an external attack or threat as plausible without establishing the cause. It also records Egge among UN officials on a threat list linked to OAS-associated mercenaries. That list does not establish who caused the crash.
