I‘ve been so busy the last few months working on suggested revisions to my investigative memoir and its proposal that I haven’t had a chance to blog. If things go as planned, I hope to have a contract by year end. However, recent events have got me thinking and have led me to do a little research about a pattern I have come to notice.
It’s interesting how some of those who speak out and are critical of abusive and corrupt regimes end up dying in mysterious air crashes. My investigative memoir is also about a similar type of mysterious air crash whose circumstances remain classified. Below is a partial list I’ve started:
September 19, 1961 crash of a Douglas DC-6 airliner carrying 15 passengers, including United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld. Hammarskjöld had stood up against the superpowers in the UN Security Council and had defended the interests of small nations. Hammarskjöld was en route to negotiate a cease-fire between United Nations forces in the Congo and Katangese troops. Circumstances of the crash remain classified, though one theory with some evidence suggests Katangese separatists ordered a Belgian mercenary pilot to shoot down the plane with the support of British intelligence and the CIA.
March 9, 2000 crash of a Yakovlev Yak-40 carrying nine passengers seconds after taking off from Sheremetyevo Airport. One of the nine passengers was Artyom Borovik, a journalist who built an investigative newspaper and multimedia empire, looking into corruption among Russia’s elite and Putin using Russian security services in a plot to justify a new invasion of Chechnya.
April 28, 2002 crash of a M-8 helicopter carrying 16 passengers in the Krasnoyarsk territory of Siberia. One of the passengers was a former Russian general and military hero, Aleksandr Lebed, who had become a rising star in Russian politics and was perceived as a formidable challenger to Putin.
April 10, 2010, crash of a Tupolev Polish Air Force jet carrying Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 96 members of Poland’s government and their relatives. The delegation was flying from Warsaw to Smolensk to mark the 70th anniversary of the 1940 Soviet massacre of thousands of Polish military officers and elites in the Katyn forest near Smolensk.
August 23, 2023 crash of an Embraer Legacy 600 passenger jet departing Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport en route to St. Petersburg. Ten people aboard died, including Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the mercenary group Wagner Group. Prigozhin had recently challenged how Russia was fighting the war in Ukraine. Putin had labeled him and his men as mutinous traitors.
James B. Wells 