{{A former British intelligence officer claimed that Britain played a role in the assassination of Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba, one of her friends has told the British media.}}<\/p>\n
Before she died three years ago, Daphne Park — who was sent as an MI6 officer to the Belgian Congo in 1959 — told a fellow member of Britain’s House of Lords that she had helped coordinate Britain’s role in Lumumba’s elimination two years later.<\/p>\n
The claim will spark surprise because the former colonial power Belgium concluded in 2001 that it had a “moral responsibility” in the assassination of Lumumba, Congo’s first democratically-elected prime minister.<\/p>\n
David Lea said in a letter to the London Review of Books that he had a conversation with Park in 2009 — a year before she died — in which they discussed the likelihood of Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence agency being involved in Lumumba’s death.<\/p>\n
“It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park a few months before she died,” Lea said.<\/p>\n
“I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba’s abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. ‘We did,’ she replied. ‘I organised it’.”<\/p>\n
“It was a conversation-stopper. I was stunned,” Lea said, adding that he concluded from the exchange that whoever was directly culpable for Lumumba’s death, the British government was “at the centre of the spider’s web”.<\/p>\n
His letter was in response to a new book on the British secret services called “Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire”.<\/p>\n
Park is said to have had a high degree of influence in the region after she was appointed consul and first secretary in Leopoldville — now known as Kinshasa — in 1959, one year before Congo won its independence from Belgium.<\/p>\n
The CIA is also believed to have played a role in organising the plot to eliminate Lumumba, because of his growing alliance with the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n
Lumumba was killed by firing squad after a coup led by Joseph-Desire Mobutu. Mobutu renamed the country Zaire. It is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.<\/p>\n
Lumumba’s death is to be the subject of a judicial probe in Belgium after a court gave the go-ahead last year.<\/p>\n
AFP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{{A former British intelligence officer claimed that Britain played a role in the assassination of Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba, one of her friends has told the British media.}} Before she died three years ago, Daphne Park — who was sent as an MI6 officer to the Belgian Congo in 1959 — told a fellow […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[99],"byline":[170],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-6916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-greatlakesnews","byline-igihe"],"bylines":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"contributors":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6916"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=6916"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=6916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}