2002 - An EgyptAir plane with 55 passengers and crew on board crashed as it was attempting to land at Tunis airport. At least 15 people were confirmed dead. “About 15 dead have been accounted for so far,” Egypt’s ambassador in Tunis, Mahdy Fathallah, said after the plane came down in fog and heavy rain. A senior Tunisian government official said some of the passengers on the EgyptAir flight 843, believed to be a Boeing 737, had survived and 13 had been taken to hospital. A witness of the crash said the plane came down in the Nahli area of Tunis in wet weather. The mountainous crash site was very difficult to reach, but rescue workers had managed to get to the scene and were evacuating the injured. There were 20 Egyptian passengers, eight crew and 27 passengers of other nationalities on board.
Other important events
1821 - Britain takes over Sierra Leone, Gambia and the Gold Coast to form British West Africa.
1915 - Nearly 1,200 people die when a German torpedo sinks the British liner Lusitania off the Irish coast.
1926 - French Army and Air Force bombard sections of Damascus during an Arab revolt.
1936 - British aviator Amy Johnson makes the fastest-ever solo flight from Gravesend, England to Cape Town, South Africa.
1945 - Germany signs an unconditional surrender at Allied headquarters in France.
1960 - Leonid Brezhnev takes over as president of the Soviet Union.
1971 - The US removes all controls on use of dollars in American transactions with China.
1975 - US President Gerald Ford declares an end to Vietnam war.
1991 - Tornado in Dhaka, Bangladesh kills 200 people and more than 1,000 are injured.
1995 - Jacques Chirac, conservative mayor of Paris, wins France’s presidency.
1996 - Lee Hong-koo is chosen as a leader of ruling New Korea Party.
1998 - Germany’s Daimler-Benz AG and Chrysler Corp merge, a $40 billion (Dh147.12 billion) deal which will create the world’s number five carmaker.
2000 - Vladimir Putin takes over as Russian President.
2002 - A China Northern Airlines plane MD-82 crashes into the water off northeastern China, killing all 103 passengers and nine crew members.
2008 - Dmitry Medvedev is named Russia’s president.
2013 - Two bomb attacks at the election rallies in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan, kill 17 people.
2015 - The Sharjah Centre for Space Sciences and Astronomy opens in University City of Sharjah.
