The United Nations has appointed an independent panel of experts to reopen an investigation into the 1961 death of UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjold in a plane crash, a UN spokesman says.
The panel of experts includes Kerryn Macaulay of Australia, Mohamed Chande Othman of Tanzania and Henrik Larsen of Denmark.
The Swedish diplomat, along with his UN team, was on his way to negotiate a ceasefire in Congo when his plane crashed in September 1961 in Ndola, then part of Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia.
The original investigation by a UN commission, which was closed in 1962, failed to establish the cause of the crash. Since then, there have been various reports that his plane was shot down.
UN member states decided at the end of December to reopen the case after a commission of international jurists said new evidence could shed light on events surrounding the crash and give a definitive answer to claims that Hammarskjold was assassinated.
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The jurists said in a report that records needed for the inquiry could be provided by the US. The US National Security Agency is known to have recorded information in the region, possibly including radio traffic from the Ndola airport on the night of the crash.
The panel will have three months to evaluate new evidence obtained in recent years about the circumstances of the crash and will present its findings to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the end of June.
Hammarskjold became the second secretary-general of the UN in 1953.
Various studies, including the 2011 book by A. Susan Williams, Who killed Hammarskjold, have made a case for sabotage, citing multinational mining companies and the governments of Britain, Belgium, the US and South Africa.
