2003: Anna Lindh’s political, diplomatic and personal friends from Sweden and around the world bid an emotional farewell to the murdered foreign minister in a memorial service held in Stockholm. Guests included British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, whom Lindh once kept waiting during a meeting to take a call from her son, the German and French foreign ministers Joschka Fischer and Dominique de Villepin, EU Commission President Romano Prodi. Lindh died on September 11, a day after being stabbed in a department store in central Stockholm. As flags flew at half-mast across Sweden, a light rain drizzled over Stockholm’s City Hall where the 75-minute ceremony saw some 1,300 high-profile guests as well as Lindh’s family and close friends, a day ahead of her funeral which will be a strictly private affair.
Other major events on September 19
1881 US President James A. Garfield dies of wounds inflicted by an assassin.
1893 New Zealand becomes the first country in the world to grant national voting rights to women.
1941 Germans take Kiev in the Soviet Union.
1944 Soviet Union and Finland sign a peace treaty in Moscow, ending a three-year war.
1955 Argentina’s President Juan Peron is ousted after revolts by army and navy.
1962 China attacks Indian forces, seizing part of Kashmir after a three-week war.
1983 Caribbean islands St Kitts and Nevis become independent of Britain.
1984 A bomb kills 14 at US Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon.
1985 An earthquake under the Pacific coast shakes Mexico City, killing 10,000 people.
1989 A French airliner blows up over Niger, killing 171 people.
1997 A crowded passenger train collides with a freight train in west London, killing six people.
2004 Hu Jintao becomes the undisputed leader of China.
2007 Anti-Syrian lawmaker Antoine Ganem dies in a car bombing in Beirut.
2011 At least 26 Pakistani Shiite pilgrims travelling to Iran are killed by gunmen in Mastung, Quetta.
2014 Scotland votes ‘no’ to independence and opted to remain an integral part of the United Kingdom.
2016 Vladimir Putin’s party wins parliamentary majority in Russia.
2017 A 7.1-magnitude earthquake strikes central Mexico, killing at least 140 people.
