Despite the multiple official inquiries that failed to find evidence of assassination or other forms of foul play, several people have continued to advance theories involving hostile interests. and that evidence of assassination was dismissed. The day after the crash, former US president
Harry Truman commented that Hammarskjöld "was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said 'when they killed him'." On 19 August 1998, archbishop
Desmond Tutu, chairman of South Africa's
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), stated that recently uncovered letters had implicated
MI5, the CIA and
South African intelligence services in the crash. One TRC letter said that a bomb in the aircraft's wheel bay was set to detonate when the wheels descended for landing. Tutu's commission were unable to investigate the truth of the letters or the allegations that South African or Western intelligence agencies played a role in the crash. The
British Foreign Office suggested that the letters may have been created as means of Soviet
misinformation or
disinformation. In a 2005 interview, Norwegian army
major general Bjørn Egge, who had been the first UN officer to see Hammarskjöld's body, claimed that Hammarskjöld had a hole in his forehead and that the hole was subsequently
airbrushed from postmortem photos. Egge believed that Hammarskjöld had been thrown from the plane and that grass and leaves in his hands might indicate that he had survived the crash and tried to scramble away from the wreckage. Egge did not claim that the hole in Hammarskjöld's head was the result of a gunshot wound. According to numerous witnesses interviewed by Swedish aid worker Göran Björkdahl in the 2000s, Hammarskjöld's plane was downed by another aircraft. Björkdahl reviewed previously unavailable archive documents and internal UN communications and believed that the plane was intentionally downed for the benefit of mining companies such as
Union Minière. In 2011, the book
Who Killed Hammarskjold? by
Susan Williams outlined several doubts about the accidental nature of the crash. It led to the formation of an independent, unofficial commission headed by the British jurist
Stephen Sedley in 2012 to determine whether there was new evidence that would justify the UN reopening its 1962 inquiry. The Sedley commission's report was presented on 9 September 2013 at the
Peace Palace in The Hague. It recommended that the UN reopen its inquiry "pursuant to General Assembly resolution 1759 (XVII) of 26 October 1962." In March 2015, Mohamed Chande Othman was appointed to support the UN's ongoing Hammarskjöld Commission. In April 2014,
The Guardian published evidence implicating military pilot Jan van Risseghem, who was Tshombe's pilot in Katanga. The article claimed that American
NSA employee Charles Southall, working at the NSA listening station in
Cyprus in 1961 shortly after midnight on the night of the crash, heard an intercept of a pilot's commentary in the air over Ndola, away. Southall recalled the pilot saying: "I see a transport plane coming low. All the lights are on. I'm going down to make a run on it. Yes, it is the Transair DC-6. It's the plane," adding that the pilot's voice was "cool and professional." Southall then heard the sound of gunfire and the pilot exclaiming: "I've hit it. There are flames! It's going down. It's crashing!" Based on
Katangese Air Force records, a
Fouga CM.170 Magister was the aircraft most likely involved, and the website Belgian Wings claims that van Risseghem piloted Magisters for the KAF in 1961. == Memorial ==