The prevailing view is that Hammarskjold's plane was shot down by cannon fire from a Belgian Fouda jet fighter.
The Scandinavian docu journalists seem to have confirmed that finding, along with naming the pilot, who was code-named "Congo Red." The organization that orchestrated the shoot-down was called the South African Institute for Maritime Research, led by a Dr. Maxwell who was at the crash site just outside the Ndola airport. I forget the name of the pilot, but the SAIMR also placed a bomb onboard Hammarskjold's plane, which failed to detonate. The shoot-down was the back-up option.
SAIMR was sanctioned by the apartheid regime of South Africa, but worked mostly elsewhere on the African continent. They were a large freelance operation and worked extensively to destabilize emerging indigenous democracies.
That kind of work ties into the dynamics revealed by John Perkins in his NY Times bestseller: Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. That's a book I highly recommend.
Remember, this is the kind of work our buddy Sgt Ted Braden was doing in the Congo - fighting against the indigenous Congolese forces. Also, it is a story that I have a personal take on - my first serious girlfriend had to escape the revolution in the Congo during the middle of the night and she and her family found refuge in British Rhodesia.
Further, Netflix, (or Hulu), also is showing a wonderful docu-drama, Siege at Jodotville, that details related events in the Congo just prior to Hammarskjold's death. The movie portrays the gallant resistance of a company of Irish infantry - who were part of the UN "peace-keeping" force - from a massive attack by Katangan mercenaries. It shows the enormous military might of the Katangan forces and the strange-but-well-intentioned effort by Hammarskjold to end Katanga's secession from the Congolese government and break the stranglehold of the western mining interests on their puppet regime, headed by Moshe Tsombe.
Hammarskjold's efforts were unprecedented in my view, and I know of no other comparable political and military move by any other UN leader.
After Hammarskjold's death, the UN backed out of Katanga, and the area has been subject to civil wars and rampant violence ever since. The turmoil has spread to nearby countries and another documentary on Netflix about the warfare in the Virunga Mountains of eastern Congo and western Uganda is fascinating.
In a related matter, the docus on Joseph Kony and The Lord's Resistance Army in this area are gruesome. Kony made the use of child soldiers wide-spread, and they continue to roam central Africa, defying several efforts to combat their terrorism. Militias in nearby countries have adopted Kony's tactics, which have resulted in the Lost Boys of the Sudan, and the on-going troubles in Darfur and South Sudan.
