Cold Case Hammarskjöld

Cold Case Hammarskjöld is a documentary film by Danish film maker Mads Brügger about the death of UN General Secretary Dag Hammarskjöld, whose airplane crashed in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) in 1961.

According to the film, Hammarskjöld's plane was shot down by Belgian-British mercenary pilot Jan van Risseghem. Up to 2019, no culprit was known, and van Risseghem had referred to his plane’s log book, which indicated that he was not in Katanga at the time. However, pilot Roger Bracco told the filmmakers that the log was falsified. Another person who knew van Risseghem, Pierre Coppens, told the filmmakers that in 1965 van Risseghem had told him that he was the one who shot down the plane. van Risseghem had told him how he had solved the technical challenges in downing the plane. According to Coppens, van Risseghem did not know who was on board the plane when he shot it down.

The film Cold Case Hammarskjöld premiered on 26 January at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival.

Synopsis
Mads Brügger teams up with Göran Björkdahl, who received from his father a metal plate believed to be a piece from the Albertina (Hammarskjöld's plane). They develop and investigate the theory that a smaller jet plane opened fire on the Albertina near Ndola and brought it down, possibly after an attempt to have a bomb on board go off after take-off in Lubumbashi did not succeed. Their revelations trigger a new (non-conclusive) investigation into Hammarskjöld's death; as a part of this new investigation Björkdahl's metal plate is examined and determined to be not authentic. Near Ndola airport, Brügger and Björkdahl locate what they believe to be the burial site of the wreckage of the Albertina, and they make a comical attempt at excavating it, but are soon stopped by local authorities.

The film moves to South Africa, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1998 revealed a document with an outline for the assassination of Hammarskjöld. Brügger and Björkdahl want to trace the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR), the organization behind this document, through its believed leader, Keith Maxwell, who operated a number of medical clinics in the townships of South Africa, though he was not a doctor. They believe SAIMR to have been a mercenary organization operating by order of MI-6 and the CIA, and involved in the Hammarskjöld assassination, but they cannot prove this despite recovering the first part of Maxwell's fictionalized autobiography. They also cannot explain the medical clinics, apart from Maxwell's strong interest in AIDS.

The final part of the film brings forward two new witnesses, claimed to be former SAIMR members or close relatives. These witnesses confirm that SAIMR was a clandestine mercenary organization. They claim SAIMR served the interests of white supremacy in Africa, and that it ran operations to administer the HIV virus to black people in South Africa and Mozambique through cover-up clinics, with the goal of eradicating them. Brügger and Björkdahl recover the second part of the autobiography of Maxwell, which confirms the involvement of SAIMR in the Hammarskjöld assassination. The first witness claims the playing card depicted in one of the photos of Hammarskjöld's corpse is internal code for CIA involvement.