A Sundance documentary ostensibly about the 1961 plane crash which killed then UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjold, contains explosive claims of a conspiracy to spread HIV among South Africa’s black population.
Directed by controversial Danish journalist, filmmaker, and provocateur Mads Brügger, ‘Cold Case Hammarskjold,’ debuted Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival.
It details an investigation into the largely unsolved death of Swedish diplomat and former UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, whose DC-6 plane crashed near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia (modern Zambia). Initial investigations identified the cause as pilot error or mere mechanical fault, though doubts have persisted in the 50+ years since the crash.
Throughout the course of the new documentary, Brügger and his team investigate a white militia, the South African Institute for Maritime Research (SAIMR). According to documents the filmmakers uncovered, the group operated with support from the CIA and British Intelligence and orchestrated the 1961 plane crash which killed Hammarskjold. The documentarians eventually encounter and interview a man named Alexander Jones who is allegedly a former member of the group.
Jones, who is not related to Alex Jones of InfoWars, claims the mercenary group used phony vaccinations to spread HIV with a view to wiping out the black population of South Africa, in addition to carrying out the Hammarskjold assassination.
“We were at war,” Jones says, as cited by The New York Times. “Black people in South Africa were the enemy.”
However, medical experts have already dismissed Jones’ claims as medically dubious and unscientific in the extreme.
“The probability that they were able to do this is close to zero,” said Dr. Salim S Abdool Karim, the director of Caprisa, an AIDS research center in South Africa, citing the immense resources that would be required to conduct such a far-fetched attempt at genocide.