SALVADOR ALLENDE
When Chilean President Salvador Allende (pictured above) died in a 1973 coup, the military junta that seized control of the country announced that the Marxist leader had fatally shot himself in the head in his besieged presidential palace with a submachine gun given to him by Cuba's Fidel Castro, according to an autopsy. But doubts about the official narrative swiftly surfaced; within days of Allende's death, his wife suggested that her husband might have been murdered by the military, and Castro embraced the theory. Later, a doctor who was with the president on the day of his death insisted that Allende had killed himself, while a Chilean medical examiner backed the assassination hypothesis.
In early 2011, a Chilean judge ordered an investigation into Allende's death as part of an inquiry into human rights abuses under Gen. Augusto Pinochet. After exhuming Allende's remains, foreign experts concluded that Allende had indeed committed suicide using the AK-47 he'd received from Castro. After four decades of conspiracy theories about Allende's death, the second autopsy had confirmed the first.
WLADYSLAW SIKORSKI
Wladyslaw Sikorski, the leader of Poland's government-in-exile during World War II, perished in a plane crash near Gibraltar in 1943. A British investigation at the time blamed the incident on jammed controls, but speculation swirled for decades that Sikorski had been assassinated prior to the crash -- perhaps even on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin or British leader Winston Churchill.
Polish authorities exhumed Sikorski's remains in 2008, but investigators soon concluded that the general died of the kind of multiple organ failure that people typically suffer in a plane crash, and uncovered no evidence that he was poisoned, shot, or strangled. Poland's Institute of National Remembrance, which had launched the probe, refused to accept that the plane had simply malfunctioned, quickly moving on to its next suspect: sabotage.
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