1993 - Fifty five people were killed when an Indian Airlines plane crashed on take-off after apparently hitting a truck carrying cotton bales. The Boeing 737 crashed near the western city of Aurangabad in hot, low-density air due to inadequate engine power. The aircraft, with 112 passengers and six crew, had just taken off from Aurangabad for Mumbai. Before it could gain enough height, its landing gear hit a high-rise truck, passing on the road close to the runway outside the perimeter wall at the eastern end, caught fire and the aircraft belly-landed some seven km from the airport. The plane broke into three pieces and parts of the wreckage caught fire, according to Indian Airlines officials. Fifty-seven passengers survived along with four crewmembers.
Other important events
1828 - Russia declares war on Ottoman Empire in Turkey.
1860 - Spain and Morocco sign a peace deal.
1865 - John Wilkes Booth, assassin of US President Abraham Lincoln, is killed by troops in Virginia.
1872 - Civil war breaks out in Spain.
1885 - Britain occupies Port Hamilton.
1925 - Paul von Hindenburg is elected President of Germany.
1942 - A coal mine disaster in Benxi, Japanese-occupied China, kills 1,549 workers.
1961 - American Robert Noyce patents the integrated circuit.
1962 - First international satellite is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
1964 - African nations of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merge to form Tanzania.
1986 - The world’s worst nuclear accident occurs at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union.
1989 - Chinese students march to central Beijing to protest government statements condemning their campaign for democracy.
1990 - Leftist Colombian presidential candidate Carlos Pizarro is assassinated aboard a Colombian airliner.
1994 - Taiwanese airliner crashes in Japan, killing 264.
1996 - US peace-shuttle diplomacy finally brings a ceasefire to war-damaged Lebanon with a deal announced by Warren Christopher.
1999 - Top BBC television personality Jill Dando is murdered outside her London home.
2001 - Junichiro Koizumi is elected Japan’s new Prime Minister.
2005 - Syria’s last soldier in Lebanon walks across the border.
2010 - Sudanese President Omar Al Bashir wins the country’s first multi-party presidential election in over two decades.
2013 - A car bomb explodes near a secular party’s election office in Karachi, Pakistan, killing at least 10 people.
2015 - Sudanese poet Mohammad Al Fitory, a leading advocate of liberation in Africa, dies at the age of 78.
2016 - Saudi Arabia has plans to issue select visas to welcome tens of thousands of tourists a year as part of a sweeping national reform plan.
