Anwar Sadat assassinated

On October 6, 1981, Egypt held a military parade in Cairo to mark the anniversary of the 1973 war with Israel. President Anwar Sadat sat in the reviewing stand. As a flypast roared overhead, an army truck stopped and a group of soldiers jumped out. They threw a grenade and fired rifles at the stand. Sadat was hit several times and died soon afterward in hospital, along with several others. Vice President Hosni Mubarak, who had been seated beside him, was slightly wounded and soon became president.¹³⁴

The killers belonged to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a militant group led by Lieutenant Khalid al-Islambuli, a young army officer. They considered Sadat an enemy of Islam for several reasons: the peace treaty with Israel that followed the Camp David Accords of 1978, his crackdown on Islamists, and what they saw as his un-Islamic government. At Camp David Sadat had won back the Sinai and a Nobel Peace Prize, shared with Israel's Menachem Begin, but Egypt was suspended from the Arab League and other Arab states cut ties. In September 1981 Sadat had arrested about 1,500 opponents of all kinds, including Islamists.¹²³

Mubarak declared a state of emergency, which remained in force for decades, and the plotters were tried. Islambuli and others were executed in April 1982. A defendant named Ayman al-Zawahiri, a doctor and later the leader of al-Qaeda, was jailed. The peace with Israel survived the assassination and remains in effect. Mubarak ruled for almost thirty years until his ouster in the 2011 revolution.²³⁴