Conference on Dag Hammarskjöld's Plane Crash: Dr Alanna O’Malley 

On 29 February 2024, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (School of Advanced Study) and the UN Association Westminster hosted this conference to consider next steps for the current UN investigation into the tragic crash that killed the UN Secretary General and 15 others in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1961. Further information about the conference and transcripts of many of the papers can be found on the Institute’s website at commonwealth.sas.ac.uk/. Here Dr Alanna O’Malley (Associate Professor, Institute for History at Leiden University) discusses the political context in which Hammarskjöld was operating in 1961 and the issue of the lone Fouga jet in the skies above Katanga in the weeks before his death.