A Belgian police officer kept Lumumba's tooth after dissolving his body in acid; Belgium returned it in 2022, and the last suspect died before trial in 2026

Patrice Lumumba was the first prime minister of independent Congo. In January 1961 he was killed in Katanga by a Belgian-backed secessionist group, with his allies Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito. Gerard Soete, a Belgian police commissioner, later admitted that he dug up the body, cut it up and dissolved it in acid. He kept a tooth. In 2001 a Belgian parliamentary commission found that Belgium bore "moral responsibility" for the killing, and the government apologised a year later. In 2011 Lumumba's son François filed a complaint in Belgium naming a dozen Belgian officials and diplomats. In 2016, after Soete's daughter showed the tooth to journalists, Belgian authorities seized it from her. On 20 June 2022 federal prosecutor Frédéric Van Leeuw handed it to the family in a small blue box at the Egmont Palace in Brussels. On 30 June 2022, Congo's independence day, it was laid in a mausoleum in Kinshasa. In November 2024 the mausoleum was broken into and the coffin left half open on the ground; Lumumba's grandson Amory said the tooth had not been stolen. On 17 March 2026 a Brussels court sent Étienne Davignon, 93, a junior diplomat in 1961 and the last of ten Belgian suspects alive, to trial for war crimes. He appealed. His family announced his death on 18 May 2026. The appeals chamber was then left to rule only on whether the prosecution had ended. The tooth is the only part of Lumumba's body ever returned.