Samajwadi Party lawmaker and former ‘Bandit Queen’ Phoolan Devi was shot dead in broad daylight outside her official residence in the high-security capital area of New Delhi, prompting her party to demand the resignation of federal Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani and alleging a political conspiracy behind her gruesome assassination. The local Delhi Police, which was accused of a late reaction in taking almost 15 minutes to reach the spot, barely a kilometre from Parliament House, has handed over the case to the Crime Branch for investigation after sounding a red alert in the city. Three masked assailants started firing indiscriminately as soon as Phoolan, 38, alighted from her car at 1.30pm after she drove down to her 44, Ashoka Road bungalow from the nearby Parliament House. She was hit by three bullets in the head. One of the assailants was also injured in the shootout following retaliatory firing by Phoolan’s bodyguard Balvinder Singh, who himself is fighting a grim battle with death at the RML Hospital.
1878 China’s first diplomatic mission to US arrives in Washington.
1894 The Japanese navy defeats a Chinese fleet in Kanghwa Bay, sparking a Sino-Japanese War.
1909 French aviator Louis Bleriot becomes the first person to fly across the English Channel.
1920 French forces occupy Damascus, Syria.
1934 Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss is assassinated in an unsuccessful Nazi coup attempt in Austria.
1943 Benito Mussolini is forced to resign as prime minister of Italy during the Second World War.
1952 Puerto Rico becomes a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.
1956 Italian liner Andrea Doria and Swedish ship Stockholm collide off the coast of North America. Fifty people are killed in the accident.
1957 Tunisia becomes independent from France.
1963 United States, Soviet Union and Britain conclude treaty prohibiting nuclear testing in atmosphere, space or under water.
1968 Pope Paul VI bans all artificial birth control methods for Roman Catholics.
1971 Dr Christiaan Barnard transplants two lungs and a heart into a man in Cape Town, South Africa.
1978 The world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, is born in Britain.
1979 Fire guts the entire southern end of the Dnata building, one of Dubai’s showpiece projects.
1980 Two Jordanian brothers surrender after hijacking a Kuwait Airways Boeing 737 jetliner at Kuwait airport.
1984 Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to walk in space.
1994 Jordan and Israel seal the end of a 46-year state of war.
1996 Burundi’s Tutsi-dominated army seizes power, ending a power vacuum.
1998 Saudi Arabia and Yemen reach an agreement on the principles of a solution to a border conflict.
1999 Northern Ireland’s Eddie Irvine wins Austrian Grand Prix in Spielberg.
2000 An Air France Concorde travelling to New York crashes into a hotel outside Paris shortly after take-off, killing 113 people.
2002 Floods ravage South Asia, leaving more than seven million homeless and 288 dead in Bangladesh, Nepal and India.
2007 Pratibha Devisingh Patil makes history as she sworn in as India’s first woman President.
2008 Eight small bombs explode in quick succession across the south Indian city of Bengaluru, killing two people.
2009 Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is declared by Indonesia’s General Election Commission as the new president of the country.
2013 At least 80 people die and 140 are injured after a train derails in north-western Spain.
