UNITED NATIONS, Oct. 26 (Xinhua) -- The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday called on the General Assembly to endorse a report related to the death of former UN chief Dag Hammarskjold and his accompanies.
Hammarskjold is a Swedish diplomat, economist and author who served as the second secretary-general of the United Nations from April 1953 until his death in a plane crash en route to a cease-fire negotiation in Africa in September 1961.
Guterres has transmitted the report to the president of the General Assembly, "together with his own observations on the progress made and on the way forward in the search for the truth" relating to the death of Hammarskjold and other 15 persons on board, Guterres' deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said in a statement.
In February, Guterres authorized Mohamed Othman, former chief justice of Tanzania, to work as the Eminent Person looking into the causes of those deaths.
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.
On Wednesday, Othman released the Eminent Person report, concluding that all passengers died from injuries sustained during the plane crash, either instantaneously, or soon after.
"As to the cause of the crash, the Eminent Person considered it plausible that an external attack or threat may have been the cause," he said.
Othman also noted that it remains possible that the crash was an accident caused by pilot error without external interference, and that it was plausible that human factors including fatigue played a role in the crash, Haq added.
Based on the Eminent Person's findings, the secretary-general is of the view that the information made available to the United Nations to date has been insufficient to come to conclusions about the cause or causes of the crash, according to Haq.
He said "the secretary-general calls on the General Assembly to remain seized of the matter, and to endorse the report of the Eminent Person and his recommendations."
The Eminent Person recommended "member states appoint an independent and high-ranking official to conduct a dedicated and internal review of their archives, in particular, their intelligence, security and defense archives, with a view to ensuring comprehensive access to relevant information and establishing what happened on that fateful night," Haq said.
