A former British intelligence officer claimed that Britain played a role in the assassination of Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba, one of her friends has told the British media.

Before she died three years ago, Daphne Park -- who was sent as an MI6 officer to the Belgian Congo in 1959 -- told a fellow member of Britain`s House of Lords that she had helped coordinate Britain`s role in Lumumba`s elimination two years later.

The claim will spark surprise because the former colonial power Belgium concluded in 2001 that it had a "moral responsibility" in the assassination of Lumumba, Congo`s first democratically-elected prime minister.

David Lea said in a letter to the London Review of Books that he had a conversation with Park in 2009 -- a year before she died -- in which they discussed the likelihood of Britain`s MI6 foreign intelligence agency being involved in Lumumba`s death.

"It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park a few months before she died," Lea said.

"I mentioned the uproar surrounding Lumumba`s abduction and murder, and recalled the theory that MI6 might have had something to do with it. `We did,` she replied. `I organised it`."

"It was a conversation-stopper. I was stunned," Lea said, adding that he concluded from the exchange that whoever was directly culpable for Lumumba`s death, the British government was "at the centre of the spider`s web".

His letter was in response to a new book on the British secret services called "Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire".

Park is said to have had a high degree of influence in the region after she was appointed consul and first secretary in Leopoldville -- now known as Kinshasa -- in 1959, one year before Congo won its independence from Belgium.

The CIA is also believed to have played a role in organising the plot to eliminate Lumumba, because of his growing alliance with the Soviet Union.

Lumumba was killed by firing squad after a coup led by Joseph-Desire Mobutu. Mobutu renamed the country Zaire. It is now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Lumumba`s death is to be the subject of a judicial probe in Belgium after a court gave the go-ahead last year.

Source: ANTARA