On the night of 17 January 1961, between 21:40 and 21:43, Patrice Émery Lumumba, the first and only elected Prime Minister of the Congo Republic, was put in a line-up (a firing squad) and shot.
Lumumba had been forcibly restrained on the flight to Elisabethville on the same day, 17 January 1961. On arrival, he and his associates were conducted under arrest to the Brouwez House, where they were brutally beaten and tortured by Katangese forces (a group looking to be a separate state of the newly independent Congo Republic) and Belgian officers. This occurred while President Moïse Tshombe and his cabinet, of the state of Katanga, were deciding what to do with him.
Later that night, Lumumba was driven to an isolated spot where three firing squads had been assembled. A Belgian Commission of Inquiry found that the execution was carried out by Katanga’s authorities. It reported that President Tshombe and two other ministers were present with four Belgian officers, under the command of Katangese authorities.
The Belgians and their counterparts later wished to get rid of the bodies, and did so by digging up and dismembering the corpses, then dissolving them in sulphuric acid while the bones were ground and scattered. In later years, it became clear that the assassination was sanctioned by the Belgian government and the Dwight Eisenhower administration, the President of the United States at the time. All these parties were acting through the local agents of the Central Int
