The Belgian aristocrat charged with the assassination of a head of government died before the trial began

A 93-year-old former Belgian diplomat, recently indicted for the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister in Congo's history, died on Monday before he could be tried, reports Reuters.

The death of Etienne Davignon, an aristocrat who served as European commissioner during a decades-long career as one of Belgium's leading diplomats and industrialists, has been confirmed by the Jacques Delors Institute. Davignon was on the Board of Directors of the Paris-based think tank.

Sent to court in March, Davignon became the first person ever to be indicted in connection with this dark page of the relationship between Belgium and its former colony Congo, which became independent in 1960, the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo. Between 1971 and 1997 the country was called Zaire.

Patrice Lumumba, the first head of government of the independent Congo state, was ousted in a coup d'état in September 1960, after he had begun to approach the USSR during one of the most tense periods of the Cold War.

He was arrested, imprisoned and finally executed along with two of his lieutenants in a forest on January 17, 1961, with the complicity of Belgian officers and apparently also with the involvement of CIA agents from the US.

Count Davignon is the only survivor of the plot

The next day, the body of Lumumba, the founder of the Congolese National Movement, was dismembered and dissolved in acid. One of the Belgian agents involved extracted two of the Congolese leader's teeth as a “hunting trophy”.

The agent kept the secret until 1999, a year before his death, when he confessed to the murder, for which Belgium officially acknowledged its “moral responsibility” and opened the way for the judicial investigations that have now charged Count Etienne Davignon.

After a career in diplomacy, he held several portfolios as European Commissioner between 1977 and 1981, then Vice-President of the European Commission until 1985, after which he held the presidency of the Egmon Institute, a think tank, and was part of the influential Bilderberg Group until 2011, chairing its annual conference between 1998 and 2001.

Davignon was the only person still alive among the 11 Belgians named in the war crimes complaint filed in 2011 by Patrice Lumumba's children, and the decision to bring him to justice came after more than ten years of investigations.

Davignon's defense argued that the statute of limitations for prosecution for the alleged crimes had expired, but the family of the former Congolese leader said it was not yet too late to prosecute what his lawyers described as a “state crime”.

Davignon had appealed his indictment before he died.