At approximately 9:43 p.m. on Tuesday, January 17, 1961, the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Émery Lumumba, was shot to death by a Belgian-supervised firing squad in a forest clearing outside Élisabethville (now Lubumbashi) in the secessionist Katanga province. He was 35 years old. He had been in office for less than three months before being deposed by a Belgian-and-American-supported coup, held in extralegal detention for two months, transferred to his political enemies on January 17 under explicit Belgian escort, and killed within hours of arrival. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency had a parallel plan to poison him with a tube of doctored toothpaste; the CIA plan did not need to be activated because the Belgian-Katangan operation succeeded first. The Belgian government formally acknowledged its 'moral responsibility' in 2002 after a Belgian parliamentary inquiry. The Belgian state returned Lumumba's recovered tooth — the only physical remain that had not been dissolved in acid by his Belgian guards — to his family in Brussels on June 20, 2022, in a formal ceremony attended by Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo. King Philippe of Belgium had earlier, in June 2020, issued the first formal Belgian royal expression of regret for the colonial period. The Congolese state has yet to conduct a comprehensive investigation.
Assassinations & Disappearances
1960-1961
