Quest to solve the murder The mystery revives a theory of the conspiracy on AIDS

"The journalists who report on it must make sure to contextualize the allegations," said one of the filmmakers, Danish producer Peter Engel, "and to remind readers that, even if this is proven, it does not matter." There is no reason to turn away from modern medical clinics, which are regulated in a way that did not exist in the 1980s until the end of the apartheid era.

Such a warning was not included in the film version seen by the Times.

The documentary adds new details and raises new questions about the death of Mr Hammarskjold, a Swedish diplomat whose plane has not been fully explained. A UN panel concluded that there was "convincing evidence that the aircraft was subjected to a form of attack or threat."

But AIDS charges are likely to generate the most attention. And while Mr. Jones's story can not be corroborated, there is some support for the idea that the militia was at least interested in AIDS research. A young woman, Dagmar Feil, was killed in front of her home in 1990. Her mother told the South African authorities that she was conducting AIDS research for the militia at the time, according to contemporary documents .

Much is not known about the militia, and it is difficult to distinguish between fiction and fiction. Its leader, Keith Maxwell, had claimed that it was steeped in the traditions of the British Admiralty and that its lineage dated back to the early nineteenth century. When the Hammarskjold documents were published in the late 1990s, government officials and experts wondered what to do with them. Many rejected them as fake or the product of a Soviet misinformation campaign.

Whatever the group was at that time, in the 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed like a mercenary organization. Paramilitary groups and private military organizations were commonplace during the apartheid era, and the group known as Saimar (pronounced "Sy-marr") announced that men trained in military training had become part of the group. army were to serve in unspecified foreign operations.

Maxwell, who reportedly died in 2006, was also running medical clinics in South Africa, although he was not a doctor. And he has declared publicly that AIDS will ultimately benefit humanity and decimate the black population in South Africa.

But his interest in AIDS is far from proof of a successful campaign against germs. An eccentric figure who insisted on the title of "commodore," Maxwell's writings were fantastic and disjointed.