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.

David Lea said in a letter to the London Review of Books: "It so happens that I was having a cup of tea with Daphne Park a few months before she died.

"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 stun-ned," Lea said.

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.

Lumumba was executed by firing squad after a coup led by Joseph-Desiré Mobutu.