Historical story

Assassination of a President live

In the execution of Anwar Sadat one finds all the "right" reasons needed to make a political assassination stand out from all the others that have occurred since the beginning of history - and which it is doubtful will ever stop. It's not just who you kill, after all "if history has taught us anything it's that you can kill anyone". Here's the way, it's the "how", and leave aside the "why". It is the spectacular scenes that have survived to this day, as the President of Egypt had the misfortune that day - among other far more important misfortunes involving his life - to be assassinated live on television.

October 6, 1981 was a day of shock for the people of Egypt and the Middle East, and not only for those who watched his presidency, but also for his opponents. It's not every day you kill a President in front of his army.

On that day, then, the country was alive for the military parade held in honor of the eighth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. Sadat, sitting comfortably in his armchair on a platform near the monument to the Unknown Soldier, waited for the army units that had been preparing for weeks to satisfy him to pass in front of him and his eight bodyguards.

The tanks and the thousands of soldiers, for security reasons, had no ammunition on them, the guns were empty, making the parade 100% safe for everyone present. But four soldiers decided not to be disciplined and to arm themselves with live fire.

As the Mirages of the Egyptian Air Force flew over the stadium, distracting the crowd, at the exact same moment military trucks towing guns paraded by. A small group of assassins with their AK-47s loaded, and under the command of Lieutenant Khalid Islambuli, are on one of them and will threaten the driver. They will force him to stop just as he was in front of the stand where Sadat and his entourage were sitting.

The conspirators will quickly disembark and Islambuli will run to the President's side. The three grenades, which for hours were hidden under his helmet, will be launched towards the President, but only one will explode and without bringing the result that the conspirators wanted from the beginning. The President is alive.

The irony of the matter is that Sadat was slow to realize that he was under attack. As his nephew would later reveal, the moment he saw the lieutenant running towards him, he not only did not run for cover, but stood up and saluted him militarily at attention. He thought that all this was some part of the military display that was taking place before his eyes.

The remaining three assassins also began to run towards the stand, firing indiscriminately until they ran out of ammunition. Sadat will fall to the ground badly injured, and besides the bullets, he will also feel on his body dozens of chairs(!), which were thrown by the bystanders. They hoped that this would protect him from the shots.

All this will happen in just two minutes. Sadat will be airlifted to a military hospital in Cairo, but there is no hope for his life. An hour and a half later he will take his last breath. Along with him, ten more people will die that day and another 28 will be injured.

Of the conspirators, three will be captured wounded but alive, only one will die on the spot. It is understood, of course, that the rest would also follow his fate after a trial in 1982.

According to the authorities, 20 other people, members of an extremist group linked to some extent with the broader fundamentalist movement Takfir al-Hegira, were involved in the plot. Sadat, despite his initial popularity, had become particularly unpopular in the Arab world because of the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty he concluded in 1978 with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a move that earned him the Nobel Peace Prize. It is characteristic that no leader of an Arab country attended his funeral, except for the President of Sudan.

In the leadership of the country he will be succeeded by the then 53-year-old vice-president Hosni Mubarak, who was also injured during the assassination attempt on Sadat.

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