Tay Bridge disaster

Tay Bridge disaster
Details
Date	28 December 1879
Time	19:13
Location	Dundee
Country	Scotland
Rail line	Edinburgh to Aberdeen Line
Cause	Structural failure
Statistics
Trains	1
Passengers	70
Deaths	75 (estimate-60 known dead)
Injuries	0

The Tay Bridge disaster occurred on 28 December 1879, when the first Tay Rail Bridge, which crossed the Firth of Tay between Dundee and Wormit in Scotland, collapsed during a violent storm while a train was passing over it. The bridge was designed by the noted railway engineer Sir Thomas Bouch, using a lattice grid that combined wrought and cast iron. Major engineering flaws were the cause of the collapse, and the disaster ruined Bouch's reputation as an engineer.
Like all rail lines intended to carry passenger trains, the Tay Bridge had been subject to a Board of Trade inspection before it opened. The inspection was conducted over a three day period in February 1878 during what were described as 'favourable' weather conditions. The bridge was passed for opening subject to conditions such as a speed limit and minor remedial work. It is interesting however to note the following comment from the inspection report '... When again visiting the spot I should wish, if possible, to have an opportunity of observing the effects of high wind when a train of carriages is running over the bridge ...'.

During a violent storm on the evening of 28 December 1879, the centre section of the bridge, known as the "High Girders", collapsed, taking with it a train that was running on its single track. All 75 people believed to be on the train including 5 staff were killed, a figure which was only established by a meticulous examination of ticket sales, some from as far away as King's Cross. There were 60 known victims, but only 46 bodies were found, two of which were not recovered until February 1880.

Causes

Original Tay Bridge from the north

Tay Bridge after the disaster, from the south

Investigators quickly determined many faults in design, materials, and processes that had contributed to the failure. Bouch claimed to have received faulty information regarding wind loading, but his later statements indicated that he may have made no allowance for wind load at all. Bouch had been advised that calculating wind loads was unnecessary for girders shorter than 200 feet (61 m), and had not followed this up for his new design with longer girders^.
The section in the middle of the bridge, where the rail ran inside high girders (through trusses), rather than on top of lower ones (deck trusses), to allow a sea lane below high enough for the masts of ships, was potentially top heavy and very vulnerable to high winds. Neither Bouch nor the contractor appeared to have regularly visited the on-site foundry where iron from the previous half-built bridge was recycled. The cylindrical cast iron columns supporting the 13 longest spans of the bridge, each 245 ft (75 m) long, were of poor quality. Many had been cast horizontally, with the result that the walls were not of even thickness, and there was some evidence that imperfect castings were disguised from the (very inadequate) quality control inspections.
In particular, some of the lugs used as attachment points for the wrought iron bracing bars had been "burnt on" rather than cast with the columns. However, no evidence of the burnt-on lugs has survived, and the normal lugs were very weak. They were tested for the Inquiry by David Kirkaldy and proved to break at only about 20 long tons (20 t) rather than the expected load of 60 long tons (61 t). These lugs failed and destabilised the entire centre of the bridge during the storm.

Assassination of Benazir Bhutto

On 27 December 2007, Bhutto was killed while leaving a campaign rally for the PPP at Liaquat National Bagh in the run-up to the January 2008 parliamentary elections. After entering her bulletproof vehicle, Bhutto stood up through its sunroof to wave to the crowds. At this point, a gunman fired shots at her and subsequently explosives were detonated near the vehicle killing approximately 20 people. Bhutto was critically wounded and was rushed to Rawalpindi General Hospital. She was taken into surgery at 17:35 local time, and pronounced dead at 18:16. The cause of death, whether it was to gunshot wounds, the explosion, or a combination thereof, was not fully determined until February 2008. Eventually, Scotland Yard investigators concluded that it was due to blunt force trauma to the head as she was tossed by the explosion.
Al-Qaeda commander Mustafa Abu al-Yazid claimed responsibility for the attack, and the Pakistani government stated that it had proof that Baitullah Mehsud, affiliated with Lashkar i Jhangvi—an al-Qaeda-linked militant group—was the mastermind. However this was vigorously disputed by the Bhutto family, by the PPP that Bhutto had headed and by Mehsud himself. On 12 February 2011, an Anti-Terrorism Court in Rawalpindi issued an arrest warrant for Musharraf, claiming he was aware of an impending assassination attempt by the Taliban, but did not pass the information on to those responsible for protecting Bhutto.
After the assassination, there were initially a number of riots resulting in approximately 20 deaths, of which three were of police officers. President Musharraf decreed a three-day period of mourning.
Bhutto's 19-year-old son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari succeeded his mother as titular head of the PPP, with his father effectively running the party until his son completes his studies at Christ Church, Oxford.

Buncefield fire

The fire just ten minutes after the explosion as seen from Hunters Oak
Date	11 December 2005
Time	06:01 UTC
Location	Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, England
Casualties
43 injuries.
2 serious injuries.

The Buncefield fire was a major conflagration caused by a series of explosions on 11 December 2005 at the Hertfordshire Oil Storage Terminal, an oil storage facility located near the M1 motorway by Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, England. The terminal was the fifth largest oil-products storage depot in the United Kingdom, with a capacity of about 60,000,000 imperial gallons (272,765,400 l) of fuel. The terminal is owned by TOTAL UK Limited (60%) and Texaco (40%).
The first and largest explosion occurred at 06:01 UTC near tank 912, which led to further explosions which eventually overwhelmed 20 large storage tanks. The emergency services announced a major emergency at 06:08 and a fire fighting effort began. The cause of the explosion seems to have been a fuel-air explosion of unusually high strength. The British Geological Survey monitored the event, which measured 2.4 on the Richter scale. News reports described the incident as the biggest of its kind in peacetime Europe and certainly the biggest such explosion in the United Kingdom since the 1974 Flixborough Disaster. The flames had been extinguished by the afternoon of 13 December 2005. However, one storage tank re-ignited that evening, which the fire-fighters left to burn rather than attempt to extinguish it again.
The Health Protection Agency and the Major Incident Investigation Board provided advice to prevent incidents such as these in the future. The primary need is for safety measures to be in place to prevent fuel from exiting the tanks in which it is stored. Added safety measures are needed for when fuel does escape, mainly to prevent it forming a flammable vapour and stop pollutants from poisoning the environment.

Death of John Lennon

Murder of John Lennon
The Dakota, location of the killing
Location	The Dakota, Manhattan, New York
Date	10:50 pm, 8 December 1980 (approx. time)
Target	John Lennon
Weapon(s)	Charter Arms .38 Special revolver
Death(s)	1
Perpetrator	Mark David Chapman

John Lennon was an English musician who gained worldwide fame as one of the founders of The Beatles, for his subsequent solo career, and for his political activism and pacifism. He was shot by Mark David Chapman at the entrance of the building where he lived, The Dakota, in New York City, on Monday, 8 December 1980; Lennon had just returned from Record Plant Studio with his wife, Yoko Ono.
Lennon was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, where it was stated that nobody could have lived for more than a few minutes after sustaining such injuries. Shortly after local news stations reported Lennon's death, crowds gathered at Roosevelt Hospital and in front of The Dakota. He was cremated on 10 December 1980, at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York; the ashes were given to Ono, who chose not to hold a funeral for him. The first report of his death to a national audience was announced by Howard Cosell, on ABC's Monday Night Football.

Attack on Pearl Harbor

Attack on Pearl Harbor
Part of the Pacific Theater of World War II
Photograph from a Japanese plane of Battleship Row at the beginning of the attack. The explosion in the center is a torpedo strike on the USS Oklahoma. Two attacking Japanese planes can be seen: one over the USS Neosho and one over the Naval Yard.
Date December 7, 1941 Location Primarily Pearl Harbor, Hawaii Territory, United States Result Japanese major tactical victory United States declaration of war on the Empire of Japan Nazi German and fascist Italian declaration of war on the United States.
Belligerents
United States	Empire of Japan
Commanders and leaders
Husband Kimmel Walter Short Isaac Kidd †	Chuichi Nagumo Isoroku Yamamoto
Strength
8 battleships 8 cruisers 30 destroyers 4 submarines 49 other ships ~390 aircraft	Mobile Unit: 6 aircraft carriers 2 battleships 2 heavy cruisers 1 light cruiser 9 destroyers 8 tankers 23 fleet submarines 5 midget submarines 414 aircraft
Casualties and losses
4 battleships sunk 3 battleships damaged 1 battleship grounded 2 destroyers sunk 1 other ship sunk 3 cruisers damaged 1 destroyer damaged 3 other ships damaged 188 aircraft destroyed 155 aircraft damaged 2,402 killed 1,247 wounded	4 midget submarines sunk 1 midget submarine grounded 29 aircraft destroyed 64 killed 1 captured
Civilian casualties: 57 killed 35 wounded

The attack on Pearl Harbor (called Hawaii Operation or Operation AI by the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters (Operation Z in planning) and the Battle of Pearl Harbor) was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941 (December 8 in Japan). The attack was intended as a preventive action in order to keep the U.S. Pacific Fleet from interfering with military actions the Empire of Japan was planning in Southeast Asia against overseas territories of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States.
The base was attacked by 353 Japanese fighters, bombers and torpedo planes in two waves, launched from six aircraft carriers. All eight U.S. Navy battleships were damaged, with four being sunk. Of the eight damaged, six were raised, repaired and returned to service later in the war. The Japanese also sank or damaged three cruisers, three destroyers, an anti-aircraft training ship, and one minelayer. 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed; 2,402 Americans were killed and 1,282 wounded. The power station, shipyard, maintenance, and fuel and torpedo storage facilities, as well as the submarine piers and headquarters building (also home of the intelligence section) were not attacked. Japanese losses were light: 29 aircraft and five midget submarines lost, and 65 servicemen killed or wounded. One Japanese sailor was captured.
The attack came as a profound shock to the American people and led directly to the American entry into World War II in both the Pacific and European theaters. The following day (December 8) the United States declared war on Japan. Domestic support for isolationism, which had been strong, disappeared. Clandestine support of Britain (for example the Neutrality Patrol) was replaced by active alliance. Subsequent operations by the U.S. prompted Germany and Italy to declare war on the U.S. on December 11, which was reciprocated by the U.S. the same day.
There were numerous historical precedents for unannounced military action by Japan. However, the lack of any formal warning, particularly while negotiations were still apparently ongoing, led President Franklin D. Roosevelt to proclaim December 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy".

1992 Windsor Castle fire

The 1992 Windsor Castle fire occurred on Friday, 20 November 1992 in Windsor Castle, to the west of London, England the largest inhabited castle in the world and one of the official residences of the British monarch, Elizabeth II. The castle suffered severe damage in a fire, which destroyed some of the most historic parts of the building. Over the next few years the castle was fully repaired at great expense. The question of how the funds required should be found raised important issues about the financing of the monarchy, and led to Buckingham Palace being opened to the public for the first time to help to pay for the restoration.

The progress of the fire

The fire began in The Queen's Private Chapel at 11:33 am on Friday 20 November 1992, when a spotlight ignited a curtain. The alarm went off in the watch-room of the Castle fire brigade, manned by Chief Fire Office Marshall Smith. The site of the fire was shown by a light on a large grid map of the whole castle. Initially the Brunswick Tower alone was indicated, but lights soon lit up indicating that the fire had quickly spread to several neighbouring rooms. The major part of the State Apartments were soon ablaze.
Patrolling firemen were paged by an automatic system, and at 11:37 am Mr Smith pressed the switch to alert the Control Room at Reading. He then activated the public fire alarm, known as an ER7 alert (a continuous high pitch tone), and telephoned the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service on a direct line.
Mr Smith proceeded to the Brunswick Tower to assess the situation, and to begin the salvage operations which, together with fire precautions, had been the main responsibility of the castle brigade since the county force took over responsibility for fire-fighting at Windsor Castle in September 1991.
The Castle still had its own 20 strong force, of whom six were full-time. Equipped with a Land Rover and pump tender, they were based in the Royal Mews, stables south of the castle.
The first appliances of the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service arrived at the castle between 11:44 am and 11:45 am, some 7–8 minutes after the alert was given. By 11:48 am 10 pumping appliances had been ordered to the fire and the principal officer on duty within the brigade the Deputy Chief Officer David Harper had been informed.
By 12:12 pm there were 20 engines, and by 12:20 pm there were 35, with over 200 firemen from London, Buckinghamshire, Surrey, and Oxfordshire, as well as from Berkshire.
The Fire Incident Commander was David Harper, Deputy Chief Fire and Rescue Officer of the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service. The Chief Officer Garth Scotford was out of the country, on holiday.
By 12:20 pm the fire had spread to St George's Hall, the largest of the State Apartments, and further reinforcements were called. The fire-fighting forces by then totalled 39 appliances (including two hydraulic platforms) and 225 fire-fighters. As an indication of the scale of the fire, there had been only one 30-appliance fire in the whole of Greater London since 1973.
By 1:30 pm firebreaks had been erected by tradesmen at the southern wall of the Green Drawing Room (at the end of St George's Hall on the east side of the Quadrangle), and at the north-west corner at Chester Tower, where that tower joins the Grand Corridor. The fire-fighters had by this time begun to bring the fire under control (though the roof of the State Apartments had begun to collapse).
At 3:30 pm the fire was surrounded, and the floors of the Brunswick Tower collapsed, concentrating the fire there. Firemen had to temporarily withdraw to locate three men who were briefly lost in the smoke, and on a second occasion withdrew when men were temporarily unaccounted for when a roof fell in.
At 4:15 pm the fire had revived in the Brunswick Tower. As night fell the fire was concentrated in the Brunswick Tower, which by 6:30 pm was engulfed in flames 50 feet (15 m) high, which could be seen for many miles. At 7 pm the fire broke through the roof of the tower, and later the roof of St George's Hall finally collapsed into the conflagration.
By 8 pm the fire was finally under control, having burnt for nine hours, although it continued to burn for a further three hours. By 11 pm however the main fire was extinguished, and by 2:30 am the last secondary fires were put out. Pockets of fire remained alive until early Saturday, some 15 hours later. Sixty firemen with eight appliances remained on duty for several more days.
The fire had spread rapidly due to lack of fire stopping in cavities and roof voids.
Over one million gallons (4,500 tons) of water from Castle mains and from the River Thames had been used in fighting the fire.

Forces involved in fighting the fire

Apart from the several hundred firemen directly involved in fighting the fire, staff and tradesmen helped the Castle fire brigade and volunteer salvage corps members. They removed furniture and works of art from the endangered apartments, including a 150-foot (46 m) long table, and a 120-foot (37 m) long carpet from the Waterloo Chamber, to the safety of the castle Riding School. Also removed, in an enormous logistics exercise, were 300 clocks, a collection of miniatures, many thousands of valuable books and manuscripts, and old Master drawings from the Royal Library.
On fire officers' instructions heavy chests and tables were left behind. All items were placed on giant sheets of plastic on the North Terrace and in the Quadrangle, and the police called in dozens of removal vans from a large part of the Home Counties to carry items to other parts of the Castle.
Others of the Castle staff involved included Major Barry Eastwood, Castle Superintendent (head of administration), and the Governor of the Castle, General Sir Patrick Palmer. The staff of St. George's Chapel and Estate workers also assisted in various ways.
Members of the Royal Household helped, including the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Airlie. The Royal Collection Department were especially active, including the Director Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue, the Surveyor of Pictures Christopher Lloyd, the Deputy Surveyor of The Queen's Works of Art Hugh Roberts, the Curator of Print Room the Hon Mrs Roberts, and Librarian Oliver Everett.
The Household Cavalry arrived from Combermere Barracks, St Leonard's Road, Windsor. Some 100 officers and men of the Life Guards also proved invaluable for moving bulky items. Officers of the Royalty and Diplomatic Protection Department, led by Chief Inspector KR Miller, were also present.
Elizabeth II had been advised of the fire by a mobile phone call from the Duke of York. The Duke had been in the mews across the Quadrangle from the State Apartments, doing research work for his course at the Staff College, Camberley when the fire broke out.
The Queen arrived at 3 pm and stayed at the castle for an hour, returning again the following morning. The Prince of Wales visited in the evening and the Duke of York briefed the press at 3 pm.

Extent of damage to the Castle

There had been no serious injuries, and no deaths. Dean Lansdale (aged 21), a decorator in the Private Chapel, was burnt while removing pictures (of which he had rescued three). He was moved to the royal surgery then to hospital. Christopher Lloyd, the Surveyor of The Queen's Pictures, suffered a suspected heart attack, while five firemen were taken to hospital, two with hypothermia, three with minor burns and dust in their eyes.
The major loss was to the fabric of the Castle. The false roof above St George's Hall and the void beneath the floors for coal trucks had allowed the fire to spread. It burnt as far as the Chester Tower. Several ceilings collapsed. Apartments burnt included the Crimson Drawing Room (which was completely gutted), the Green Drawing Room (badly damaged, though only partially destroyed, by smoke and water), and The Queen's Private Chapel (including the double sided nineteenth century Henry Willis organ in the gallery between St George's Hall and Private Chapel, oak panelling, glass, and the altar).
St George's Hall partially survived, with the wall largely intact, but with the ceiling collapsed. The State Dining Room (in the Prince of Wales Tower; which was badly damaged, as was the fabric of the tower), and the Grand Reception Room (80% severely damaged, though 20% of the ceiling was eventually saved) were also devastated.
Smaller apartments damaged or destroyed (and over 100 rooms were involved in the fire) included the Star Chamber, Octagon Room, Brunswick Tower, Cornwall Tower, Prince of Wales Tower (badly damaged), Chester Tower (badly damaged), Holbein Room, and the Great Kitchen (which lost its plaster cove, and most of its mediæval timber).
The external wall above the bay window of the Crimson Drawing Room (between the Prince of Wales and Chester Towers) was seriously calcified.
The Waterloo Chamber was undamaged, as were the Grand Vestibule, Rubens Room, Ante-Throne Room, Throne Room, Ball Room, Serving Room, and China Closet (which was not affected although it was surrounded by the fire). Overall some 80% of the area of the staterooms was undamaged.
Fortuitously the seven most seriously damaged rooms had largely been emptied the previous day for rewiring. The Castle had just completed an 18-month phase of rewiring in most of the rooms destroyed.
Items from the Royal Collection lost included the Sir William Beechey equestrian portrait George III at a Review, which was too large to remove from its frame; a large late 1820s sideboard by Morel and Seddon (18 feet long); several pieces of porcelain; several chandeliers; as well as the Willis organ; and the 1851 Great Exhibition Axminster carpet partly burnt.
Tourists were allowed into the precincts within three days. The Queen was in residence a fortnight later. The Gallery and Queen Mary's Dolls' House reopened in December. The State Apartments reopened early 1993 after rewiring was completed, with all major rooms open by Easter, when only St George's Hall and the Grand Reception Room remained closed. Thus 11 of 15 principal rooms of the State Apartments were open, with two still undergoing long-term restoration, and two more destroyed.

National Lottery (United Kingdom)

The National Lottery

Region	United Kingdom and Isle of Man
Launched	1994
Operator	Camelot Group
Regulated By	National Lottery Commission
Highest Jackpot	£999,993,225
Odds of winning	994,686,972 to 1 (Lotto), 1,016,274,116 to 1 (Thunderball), 1 in 908,115,241 (Euromillions)
Number of Games	6
Shown on	BBC One

The National Lottery is the state-franchised national lottery in the United Kingdom and the Isle of Man.
It is operated by Camelot Group, to whom the licence was granted in 1994, 2001 and again in 2007. The lottery is regulated by the National Lottery Commission, and was established by the then prime minister John Major in 1994.
All prizes are paid as a lump sum and are tax-free. Of every pound (£) spent on National Lottery games, 50 pence (p) goes to the prize fund, 28p to 'good causes' as set out by Parliament (though some of this is considered by some to be a stealth tax levied to support the Big Lottery Fund, a fund constituted to support public spending), 12p to the UK Government as duty and 5p to retailers as commission, while Camelot receives 4.5p to cover operating costs and 0.5p profit. The National Lottery returns a higher percentage of revenue back to society than any other Lottery. Players must be at least 16 years of age to participate in the lottery, either in the drawn lottery games or by purchase of lottery scratch cards. To date, National Lottery games have created over 2,700 UK millionaires.

History

A statute of 1698 provided that in England lotteries were by default illegal unless specifically authorised by statute. An 1934 Act legalised small lotteries, which was further liberalised in 1956 and 1976. There could be no big national lottery until the Government established one, however.
The UK's state-franchised lottery was set up under government licence by the government of John Major in 1993, unlike most state lotteries which are operated by the state The National Lottery is privately operated on a state franchised basis in which the Camelot Group was awarded on May 25th 1994.
The first draw took place on November 19th 1994 with a special hour long show presented by Noel Edmonds and the first numbers drawn were 3 5 14 22 30 44 and the bonus was 10 and seven jackpot winners shared a prize of £5,874,778.
Tickets became available on the Isle of Man on December 2nd 1999 at the request of Tynwald.
The National Lottery undertook a major rebranding programme in 2002 designed to combat falling sales. This resulted in the main game being renamed Lotto and the National Lottery Extra being renamed Lotto Extra. However, the games as a collective are still known as The National Lottery. It is one of the most popular forms of gambling in the United Kingdom.
In November 2009 Camelot replaced its older Lotto draw machines. The new machines are named Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot and Merlin, reusing names that were used in older machines. At the same time, new machines for the Thunderball game were introduced. The new Lotto machines are the Magnum II model, manufactured by SmartPlay International Inc., and the new Thunderball machines are the SmartPlay Halogen II model..

King's Cross fire

The King's Cross St. Pancras tube station fire was a fatal fire on the London Underground. It broke out at approximately 19:30 (7:30 PM) on 18 November 1987, and killed 31 people.
It took place at King's Cross St. Pancras station, a major interchange on the London Underground. The station consisted of two parts (it has subsequently been expanded), a subsurface station on the Circle, Hammersmith & City, and Metropolitan Lines (Note: at the time of the incident, the Hammersmith & City line was considered part of the Metropolitan line) and a deep-level tube station for the Northern, Piccadilly, and Victoria Lines. The fire started in an escalator shaft serving the Piccadilly Line, which was burnt out along with the top level (entrances and ticket hall) of the deep-level tube station.

Emergency services at King's Cross

The intensity of the fire was initially inexplicable and the forensic investigation resulted in the discovery of a new fluid flow phenomenon that was completely unknown to the scientific community at the time. The subsequent public inquiry led to the introduction of new fire safety regulations.

Cause

The escalator on which the fire started had been built just before World War II. The steps and sides of the escalator were partly made of wood, which meant that they burned quickly and easily. Although smoking was banned on the subsurface sections of the London Underground in February 1985 (a consequence of the Oxford Circus fire that happened that year), the fire was most probably caused by a traveller discarding a burning match, which fell down the side of the escalator onto the running track (Fennell 1988, p. 111). The running track had not been cleaned since the escalator was constructed in the 1940s and was covered in grease and fibrous detritus that had built up over the years.
Other possible causes such as arson and an IRA bomb were quickly rejected by police as possible causes of the fire because of the lack of damage to the metal sides of the escalator that would have been present in the event of a bomb, or of significant traces of an accelerant as would be expected in an arson.

How the fire spread

Wooden escalators at Greenford tube station, similar to those that caught fire at King's Cross. Situated on an open-air platform, these are the only wooden escalators still in service on the London Underground.

The lack of visible flames and relatively clean wood smoke produced lulled the emergency services into a false sense of security, especially as the fire brigades had attended more than 400 similar tube fires over the previous three decades. Firemen later described the fire as around the size and intensity of a campfire. Many people in the ticket hall believed that the fire was small and thus not an immediate hazard: indeed, an evacuation route from the tunnels below was arranged through a parallel escalator tunnel to the ticket hall above the burning escalator. Station staff claimed that the station below the fire did not need to be evacuated because of a belief that "fires rarely burn downwards", saying that there was no fire damage below the starting point of the fire. On the other hand, another consideration is ventilation; a fire being above does not mean that smoke and other products of incomplete combustion, including carbon monoxide, will not spread downwards. Alterations to normal ventilation flows are particularly common in underground environments, including tube stations.
The fire started beneath the escalator, spread above it, then flashed over and filled the ticket hall with flames and dense smoke. Investigations later showed that a particular combination of draughts, caused by an eastbound train arriving at the station at the same time that a westbound train was leaving, created a 12 mph wind through the station and up the escalator (known as the piston effect; this helps ventilate the tube), increasing the speed at which the fire spread. This wind was however found to be not enough to account for the flashover or the fire's intense ferocity, which was described as similar to a blowtorch.

Emergency response

The London Fire Brigade initially despatched four fire appliances and a turntable ladder, with units from A24 Soho Fire Station being the first on the scene at 19:42, followed shortly by colleagues from C27 Clerkenwell, A22 Manchester Square and A23 Euston. More than 30 fire crews - over 150 firefighters - were eventually deployed to combat the incident.
A total of 14 ambulances from the London Ambulance Service fleet ferried the injured to local hospitals including University College Hospital.
The fire was officially declared extinguished at 01:46 the following day (19 November), although emergency crews remained at the scene until 18:20.

Victims

In total, 31 people were killed and more than 60 received injuries ranging from severe burns to smoke inhalation. The fatalities were among those unable to escape from the ticket hall before succumbing to the effects of the latter stages of thick smoke and the intense heat.

11 October 1982

Raising the Mary Rose

Raising the Mary Rose meant overcoming a number of delicate problems that had never been encountered before. The salvage of the Swedish warship Vasa 1959–61 was the only comparable precedent, but it had been a relatively straightforward operation since the hull was completely intact and rested upright on the seabed. It had been raised with basically the same methods as were in use in Tudor England: cables were slung under the hull and attached to two pontoons on either side of the ship which was then gradually raised and towed into shallower waters. Only one third of the Mary Rose was intact and she lay deeply embedded in mud. If the hull were raised in the traditional way, there was no guarantee that it would have enough structural strength to hold together out of water. Many suggestions for salvage were discarded, including the construction of a cofferdam around the wreck site, filling the ship with small buoyant objects (such as ping pong balls) or even pumping brine into the seabed and freezing it so that it would float and take the hull with it. After lengthy discussions it was decided in February 1980 that the hull would first be emptied of all its contents and strengthened with steel braces and frames. It would then be lifted to the surface with floating sheerlegs attached to nylon strops passing under the hull and transferred to a cradle. It was also decided that the ship would be recovered before the end of the diving season in 1982. If the wreck stayed uncovered any longer it risked irreversible damage from biological decay and tidal scouring.
During the last year of the operation, the massive scope of full excavation and salvage was beginning to take its toll on those closely involved in the project. In May 1981 Alexander McKee voiced concerns about the method chosen for the salvage and openly questioned Margaret Rule's position as excavation leader. McKee felt ignored in what he viewed as a project where he had always played a central role, both as the initiator of the search for the Mary Rose and other ships in the Solent, and as an active member throughout the diving operations. He had several supporters who all pointed to the risk of the project's turning into an embarrassing failure if the ship were damaged during salvage. To address these concerns it was suggested that the hull should be placed on top of a supporting steel cradle underwater. This would avoid the inherent risks of damaging the wooden structure if it were lifted out of the water without appropriate support. The idea of using nylon strops was also discarded in favour of drilling holes through the hull at 170 points and passing iron bolts through them to allow the attachment of wires connected to a lifting frame.

The wreck of the Mary Rose clear of the water on October 11, 1982

In the spring of 1982, after three intense seasons of archaeological underwater work, preparations began for the salvage. The operation soon ran into problems: early on there were difficulties with the custom-made lifting equipment; divers on the project belonging to the Royal Engineers had to be pulled because of the outbreak of the Falklands War; and the method of lifting the hull had to be considerably altered as late as June. After the frame was properly attached to the hull it was slowly jacked up on four legs straddling the wreck site to pull the ship off the seabed. The massive crane of the barge Tog Mor was then used to lift the frame and hull on to the specially designed cradle which was padded with water-filled bags. On the morning of 11 October 1982, the final lift of the entire package of cradle, hull and lifting frame began. At 9:03 the first timbers of the Mary Rose broke the surface in the presence of the salvaging team, Prince Charles and curious spectators on boats circling the site. A second set of bags under the hull was inflated with air to cushion the waterlogged wood and finally the whole package was transferred to the barge that would take the hull ashore. Though eventually successful, the salvage operation was close to floundering on two occasions; first when one of the supporting legs of the lifting frame was bent and had to be removed and later when a corner of the frame, with "an unforgettable crunch", slipped more than a metre (3 feet) and came close to crushing part of the hull.

10 October 2008

Orakzai bombing

10 October 2008 Orakzai bombing
Location	Orakzai Agency, Pakistan
Date	10 October 2008
Attack type	Suicide car bomb
Death(s)	110
Injured	200+

The 10 October 2008 Orakzai bombing occurred when a suicide bomber drove and detonated a pick-up truck packed with 300 kg of explosives into a meeting of 600 people, killing 40 instantly and injuring 81, although the toll later rose to 110 as many died in hospitals. The attack occurred in a remote region where the injured could not get medical attention for several hours.
The attack was preceded by a row between Taliban militants and local Shia tribesmen. Angry tribesmen clashed with the Taliban the day before and destroyed the homes of militants in the area. At the time of the attack, the Ali Khel tribesmen had gathered to discuss ways to evict the Taliban from the region.

Background

On September 28, the Taliban had asked the Ali Khel tribe, the biggest and the most influential tribe in the area, and its sub-clans to leave the region because they belonged to the minority Shia community. The tribesmen initially left, although a political agent summoned a grand jirga of all 18 tribes of the Orakzai Agency on September 30 to clear the area of the Taliban by a lashkar, or local militia. The Ali Khel tribe then returned to the area where they held a jirga on October 7 to take collective action against the Taliban along with representatives of the Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat. On October 10, the tribesmen gathered at Khadizai village to destroy the local Taliban headquarters and homes of people sheltering the militants.

October 9, 1967

Death of Che Guevara

Capture and execution

"There was no person more feared by the company (CIA) than Che Guevara because he had the capacity and charisma necessary to direct the struggle against the political repression of the traditional hierarchies in power in the countries of Latin America."

— Philip Agee, CIA agent, later defected to Cuba 

Félix Rodríguez, a Cuban exile turned CIA Special Activities Division operative, advised Bolivian troops during the hunt for Guevara in Bolivia. In addition, the 2007 documentary My Enemy's Enemy, directed by Kevin Macdonald, alleges that Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie aka "The Butcher of Lyon", advised and possibly helped the CIA orchestrate Guevara's eventual capture.
On October 7, 1967, an informant apprised the Bolivian Special Forces of the location of Guevara's guerrilla encampment in the Yuro ravine. On October 8, they encircled the area with 1,800 soldiers, and Guevara was wounded and taken prisoner while leading a detachment with Simeón Cuba Sarabia. Che biographer Jon Lee Anderson reports Bolivian Sergeant Bernardino Huanca's account: that a twice wounded Guevara, his gun rendered useless, shouted "Do not shoot! I am Che Guevara and worth more to you alive than dead."

Monument to Guevara in La Higuera

Guevara was tied up and taken to a dilapidated mud schoolhouse in the nearby village of La Higuera on the night of October 8. For the next half day, Guevara refused to be interrogated by Bolivian officers and would only speak quietly to Bolivian soldiers. One of those Bolivian soldiers, helicopter pilot Jaime Nino de Guzman, describes Che as looking "dreadful". According to Guzman, Guevara was shot through the right calf, his hair was matted with dirt, his clothes were shredded, and his feet were covered in rough leather sheaths. Despite his haggard appearance, he recounts that "Che held his head high, looked everyone straight in the eyes and asked only for something to smoke." De Guzman states that he "took pity" and gave him a small bag of tobacco for his pipe, with Guevara then smiling and thanking him. Later on the night of October 8, Guevara, despite having his hands tied, kicked Bolivian Officer Espinosa into the wall, after the officer entered the schoolhouse in order to snatch Guevara's pipe from his mouth as a souvenir. In another instance of defiance, Guevara spat in the face of Bolivian Rear Admiral Ugarteche shortly before his execution.
The following morning on October 9, Guevara asked to see the "maestra" (school teacher) of the village, 22-year-old Julia Cortez. Cortez would later state that she found Guevara to be an "agreeable looking man with a soft and ironic glance" and that during their conversation she found herself "unable to look him in the eye", because his "gaze was unbearable, piercing, and so tranquil." During their short conversation, Guevara pointed out to Cortez the poor condition of the schoolhouse, stating that it was "anti-pedagogical" to expect campesino students to be educated there, while "government officials drive Mercedes cars" ... declaring "that's what we are fighting against."
Later that morning on October 9, Bolivian President René Barrientos ordered that Guevara be killed. The order was relayed by Félix Rodríguez despite the U.S. government’s desire that Guevara be taken to Panama for further interrogation. The executioner was Mario Terán, a half-drunken sergeant in the Bolivian army who had requested to shoot Che on the basis of the fact that three of his friends from B Company, all named "Mario", had been killed in an earlier firefight with Guevara's band of guerrillas. To make the bullet wounds appear consistent with the story the government planned to release to the public, Félix Rodríguez ordered Terán to aim carefully to make it appear that Guevara had been killed in action during a clash with the Bolivian army. Gary Prado, the Bolivian captain in command of the army company that captured Guevara, said that the reasons Barrientos ordered the immediate execution of Guevara is so there would be no possibility that Guevara would escape from prison, and also so there would be no drama in regard to a trial.
Moments before Guevara was executed he was asked by a Bolivian soldier if he was thinking about his own immortality. "No", he replied, "I'm thinking about the immortality of the revolution." When Sergeant Terán entered the hut, Che Guevara then told his executioner, "I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!" Terán hesitated, then opened fire with his semiautomatic rifle, hitting Guevara in the arms and legs. Guevara writhed on the ground, apparently biting one of his wrists to avoid crying out. Terán then fired several times again, wounding him fatally in the chest at 1:10 pm, according to Rodríguez. In all, Guevara was shot nine times. This included five times in the legs, once in the right shoulder and arm, once in the chest, and finally in the throat.
Months earlier, during his last public declaration to the Tricontinental Conference, Guevara wrote his own epitaph, stating "Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this our battle cry may have reached some receptive ear and another hand may be extended to wield our weapons."

Post-execution, remains and memorial

The day after his execution on October 10, 1967, Guevara's corpse was displayed to the world press in the laundry house of the Vallegrande hospital.      

 

After his execution, Guevara's body was lashed to the landing skids of a helicopter and flown to nearby Vallegrande, where photographs were taken of him lying on a concrete slab in the laundry room of the Nuestra Señora de Malta. Several witnesses were called to confirm that it was Guevara, key amongst them British journalist Richard Gott, the only witness to have met Guevara when he was alive.
Put on public show, as hundreds of local residents filed past the body, many of them considered Guevara's corpse to represent a "Christ-like" visage, with some of them even surreptitiously clipping locks of his hair as divine relics. Such comparisons were further extended when two weeks later upon seeing the post-mortem photographs, English art critic John Berger observed that they resembled two famous paintings: Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp and Andrea Mantegna's Lamentation over the Dead Christ. There were also four correspondents present when Guevara's body arrived in Vallegrande, including Bjorn Kumm of the Swedish Aftonbladet, who described the scene in an November 11, 1967, exclusive for The New Republic.
A declassified memorandum dated October 11, 1967 to United States President Lyndon B. Johnson from his National Security Advisor, Walt Whitman Rostow, called the decision to kill Guevara "stupid" but "understandable from a Bolivian standpoint." After the execution, Rodríguez took several of Guevara's personal items, including a Rolex GMT Master wristwatch which he continued to wear many years later, often showing them to reporters during the ensuing years. Today, some of these belongings, including his flashlight, are on display at the CIA. After a military doctor amputated his hands, Bolivian army officers transferred Guevara's body to an undisclosed location and refused to reveal whether his remains had been buried or cremated. The hands were preserved in formaldehyde to be sent to Buenos Aires for fingerprint identification. (His fingerprints were on file with the Argentine police.) They were later sent to Cuba.

Plaza de la Revolución, in Havana, Cuba. Aside the Ministry of the Interior building where Guevara once worked, is a 5 story steel outline of his face. Under the image is Guevara's motto, the Spanish phrase: "Hasta la Victoria Siempre" (English: Until the Everlasting Victory Always).

On October 15, Fidel Castro acknowledged that Guevara was dead and proclaimed three days of public mourning throughout the island. On October 18, Castro addressed a crowd of one million mourners in Havana's Plaza de la Revolución and spoke about Guevara's character as a revolutionary. Fidel Castro closed his impassioned eulogy thusly:

"If we wish to express what we want the men of future generations to be, we must say: Let them be like Che! If we wish to say how we want our children to be educated, we must say without hesitation: We want them to be educated in Che’s spirit! If we want the model of a man, who does not belong to our times but to the future, I say from the depths of my heart that such a model, without a single stain on his conduct, without a single stain on his action, is Che!"

French intellectual Régis Debray, who was captured in April 1967 while with Guevara in Bolivia, gave an interview from prison, in August 1968, where he enlarged on the circumstances of Guevara's capture. Debray, who had lived with Guevara's band of guerrillas for a short time, said that in his view they were "victims of the forest" and thus "eaten by the jungle." Debray described a destitute situation where Guevara's men suffered malnutrition, lack of water, absence of shoes, and only possessed six blankets for 22 men. Debray recounts that Guevara and the others had been suffering an "illness" which caused their hands and feet to swell into "mounds of flesh" to the point where you could not discern the fingers on their hands. Despite the futile situation, Debray described Guevara as "optimistic about the future of Latin America" and remarked that Guevara was "resigned to die in the knowledge that his death would be a sort of renaissance", noting that Guevara perceived death "as a promise of rebirth" and "ritual of renewal."
In late 1995, retired Bolivian General Mario Vargas revealed to Jon Lee Anderson, author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, that Guevara's body was located near a Vallegrande airstrip. The result was a multi-national search for the remains, which would last more than a year. In July 1997, a team of Cuban geologists and Argentine forensic anthropologists discovered the remnants of seven bodies in two mass graves, including one man with amputated hands (like Guevara). Bolivian government officials with the Ministry of Interior later identified the body as Guevara when the excavated teeth "perfectly matched" a plaster mold of Che's teeth, made in Cuba prior to his Congolese expedition. The "clincher" then arrived when Argentine forensic anthropologist Alejandro Inchaurregui inspected the inside hidden pocket of a blue jacket dug up next to the handless cadaver and found a small bag of pipe tobacco. Nino de Guzman, the Bolivian helicopter pilot who had given Che a small bag of tobacco, later remarked that he "had serious doubts" at first and "thought the Cubans would just find any old bones and call it Che"; he stated "after hearing about the tobacco pouch, I have no doubts." On October 17, 1997, Guevara's remains, with those of six of his fellow combatants, were laid to rest with military honors in a specially built mausoleum in the Cuban city of Santa Clara, where he had commanded over the decisive military victory of the Cuban Revolution.

Che Guevara's Monument and Mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba.

Removed when Guevara was captured were his 30,000-word, hand-written diary, a collection of his personal poetry, and a short story he authored about a young Communist guerrilla who learns to overcome his fears.^[208] His diary documented events of the guerrilla campaign in Bolivia^[209] with the first entry on November 7, 1966 shortly after his arrival at the farm in Ñancahuazú, and the last dated October 7, 1967, the day before his capture. The diary tells how the guerrillas were forced to begin operations prematurely because of discovery by the Bolivian Army, explains Guevara's decision to divide the column into two units that were subsequently unable to re-establish contact, and describes their overall unsuccessful venture. It also records the rift between Guevara and the Communist Party of Bolivia that resulted in Guevara having significantly fewer soldiers than originally expected and shows that Guevara had a great deal of difficulty recruiting from the local populace, partly because of the fact that the guerrilla group had learned Quechua, unaware that the local language was actually a Tupí–Guaraní language. As the campaign drew to an unexpected close, Guevara became increasingly ill. He suffered from ever-worsening bouts of asthma, and most of his last offensives were carried out in an attempt to obtain medicine.
The Bolivian Diary was quickly and crudely translated by Ramparts magazine and circulated around the world. There are at least four additional diaries in existence—those of Israel Reyes Zayas (Alias "Braulio"), Harry Villegas Tamayo ("Pombo"), Eliseo Reyes Rodriguez ("Rolando") and Dariel Alarcón Ramírez ("Benigno")—each of which reveals additional aspects of the events. In July 2008, the Bolivian government of Evo Morales unveiled Guevara's formerly sealed diaries composed in two frayed notebooks, along with a logbook and several black-and-white photographs. At this event, Bolivia's vice minister of culture, Pablo Groux, expressed that there were plans to publish photographs of every handwritten page later in the year. Meanwhile, in August 2009, anthropologists working for Bolivia's Justice Ministry discovered and unearthed five of Guevara's fellow guerrillas near the Bolivian town of Teoponte.

8 October 2005.

2005 Kashmir earthquake

Date	October 8, 2005
Magnitude	7.6 Mw
Depth	10 km
Epicenter	Muzaffarabad, AJK
Countries or regions	Pakistan, India, Afghanistan
Casualties	79,000 dead (17th deadliest earthquake of all time) 106,000+ injured

The 2005 Kashmir earthquake was a major earthquake centered in Pakistan-administered Kashmir known as Azad Kashmir, near the city of Muzaffarabad, affecting Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. It occurred at 08:52:37 Pakistan Standard Time (03:52:37 GMT) on 8 October 2005. It registered a moment magnitude of 7.6 making it similar in size to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 1935 Quetta earthquake, the 2001 Gujarat earthquake, and the 2009 Sumatra earthquakes. As of 8 November, the government of Pakistan's official death toll was 75,000. The earthquake also affected countries in the surrounding region where tremors were felt in Tajikistan, western China; while officials say nearly 1,400 people also died in Indian-administered Kashmir and four people in Afghanistan. The severity of the damage caused by the earthquake is attributed to severe upthrust, coupled with poor construction.
Well over US$ 5.4 billion (400 billion Pakistani rupees) in aid arrived from all around the world. US Marine and Army helicopters stationed in neighbouring Afghanistan quickly flew aid into the devastated region. Five crossing points were opened on the Line of Control (LoC) between India and Pakistan to facilitate the flow of humanitarian and medical aid to the affected region, and international aid teams from around the world came to the region to assist in relief.

The earthquake

Map depicting tectonic plates shows how Pakistan lies on the direct fault line of South Asia, The Middle Eastern Iranian plate and the Eurasian Plate in the north

Pakistan-administered Kashmir lies in the area of collision of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates. The geological activity born out of this collision, also responsible for the birth of the Himalayan mountain range, is the cause of unstable seismicity in the region. The Pakistan Meteorological Department estimated the 5.2 magnitude on the richter scale. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) measured its magnitude as a minimum of 7.6 on the moment magnitude scale, with its epicentre at 34°29′35″N 73°37′44″E, about 19 km (12 mi) northeast of Muzaffarabad, Pakistan-administered Kashmir, and 100 km (62 mi) north-northeast of the national capital Islamabad. The earthquake is classified as "major" by the USGS. The hypocenter was located at a depth of 26 km (16 mi) below the surface. The Japan Meteorological Agency estimated its moment magnitude at 7.8. By comparison, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake had a magnitude of 9.15. The worst-hit areas were Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa,and western parts of the Kashmir valley in Indian-administered Kashmir. Also affected were some parts of the Pakistani province of Punjab, the capital city of Islamabad, and the city of Karachi which experienced a minor aftershock of magnitude 4.6. There were many secondary earthquakes in the region, mainly to the northwest of the original epicentre. A total of 147 aftershocks were registered in the first day after the initial quake, of which one had a magnitude of 6.2. Twenty-eight of these aftershocks occurred with magnitudes greater than the original quake. On October 19, a series of strong aftershocks, one with a magnitude of 5.8, occurred about 65 km (40 mi) north-northwest of Muzaffarabad. As of 27 October 2005 there have been more than 978 aftershocks with a magnitude of 4.0 and above that continue to occur daily. (See USGS for a list of recent aftershocks and effects.) Since then, measurements from satellites have shown that mountain parts directly above the epicenter have risen by a few meters, giving ample proof that the rising of the Himalayas is still going on, and that this earthquake was a consequence of that.

Casualties

2005 Kashmir earthquake casualties
Location	Dead	Injured
Pakistan,   Pakistan-administered Kashmir	73,338	100,000
Indian-administered Kashmir	1,360	6,266
Afghanistan	4	14
Total	74,500+	106,000+

Most of the casualties resulting from the earthquake were in Pakistan, where the official confirmed death toll was 74,698, putting it higher than the massive scale of destruction of the 1935 Quetta earthquake. International donors have estimated that about 86,000 died but this has not been confirmed or endorsed by Pakistani authorities.
As Saturday is a normal school day in the region, most students were at schools when the earthquake struck. Many were buried under collapsed school buildings. Many people were also trapped in their homes and, because it was the month of Ramadan, most people were taking a nap after their pre-dawn meal and did not have time to escape during the earthquake. Reports indicate that entire towns and villages were completely wiped out in Northern Pakistan with other surrounding areas also suffering severe damage.

"...a second, massive wave of death will happen if we do not step up our efforts now", Kofi Annan said on 20 October with reference to the thousand remote villages in which people are in need of medical attention, food, clean water and shelter and the 120,000 survivors that have not yet been reached."

According to Pakistan's Interior Minister Aftab Ahmad Sherpao, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz

"made the appeal to survivors" on 26 October to come down to valleys and cities for relief, because bad weather, mountainous terrain, landslides and blocked roads are making it difficult for relief workers to reach each house and the winter snows are imminent."

In Islamabad, the Margalla Towers, an apartment complex, collapsed and killed many of the residents.

Afghan territory

Four deaths were reported in Afghanistan, including a young girl who died in Jalalabad after a wall collapsed on her. The quake was felt in Kabul, but the effects were minimal.

October 7, 1985,

Achille Lauro hijacking
 
On October 7, 1985, four men representing the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) took control of the liner off Egypt as she was sailing from Alexandria to Port Said.

The Achille Lauro in 1989

The hijackers had been surprised by a crew member and acted prematurely. Holding the passengers and crew hostage, they directed the vessel to sail to Tartus, Syria, and demanded the release of 50 Palestinians then in Israeli prisons. After being refused permission to dock at Tartus, the hijackers killed disabled Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer and then threw his body overboard. The ship headed back towards Port Said, and after two days of negotiations, the hijackers agreed to abandon the liner in exchange for safe conduct and were flown towards Tunisia aboard an Egyptian commercial airliner.
United States President Ronald Reagan ordered that the plane be intercepted by F-14 Tomcats from the VF-74 "BeDevilers" and the VF-103 "Sluggers" of Carrier Air Wing 17, based on the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga, on October 10 and directed to land at Naval Air Station Sigonella, a N.A.T.O. base in Sicily, where the hijackers were arrested by the Italians after a disagreement between American and Italian authorities. The other passengers on the plane (including the hijackers' leader, Abu Abbas) were allowed to continue on to their destination, despite protests by the United States. Egypt demanded an apology from the U.S. for forcing the airplane off course.

Disagreement between Italy and U.S.

Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi claimed Italian territorial rights over the NATO base. Italian Air Force personnel and Carabinieri lined up facing the United States Navy SEALs which had arrived with two C-141s. Other Carabinieri were sent from Catania to reinforce the Italians. It was the gravest diplomatic crisis between Italy and United States and was resolved five hours later.

Later years

The ship continued in service; she was reflagged in 1987 when the Lauro Line was taken over by the Mediterranean Shipping Company to become StarLauro. On November 30, 1994, she caught fire off the coast of Somalia while enroute to South Africa. At that time, the cause of the fire was suggested by Italian officials to be a discarded cigarette. The crew attempted to battle the fire for several hours but were unsuccessful. Abandoned, the vessel sank on December 2.

6 October 1976

Thammasat University massacre

6 October 1976 Massacre
6 October 1976 Massacre Memorial in Thammasat University, Bangkok
Location	Thammasat University and at Sanam Luang in Bangkok, Thailand
Date	6 October 1976
Target	Demonstration
Attack type	Shooting
Weapon(s)	Small arms
Death(s)	46
Injured	167
Perpetrator(s)	Pramarn Adireksarn (deputy prime minister), Lieutenant-General Chumphon Lohachala (police), Prachuap Khirikhan (Border Patrol Police)

The Thammasat University Massacre, or Massacre of 6 October 1976 (เหตุการณ์ 6 ตุลา), was an attack on students and protesters that occurred on the campus of Thammasat University and at Sanam Luang in Bangkok. Students from various universities were demonstrating against the return to Thailand of Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, a former military ruler. By the official count, forty-six people died in the attack, during which protesters were shot, beaten and their bodies mutilated.
After Thanom was replaced by a civilian prime minister in October 1973, an army faction headed by Major-General Pramarn Adireksarn began plotting a return to military rule. Right-wing paramilitary groups were armed and trained and a crackdown on left-wing activists was prepared. King Bhumibol was a notable supporter of the paramilitary groups, a situation that has been described as "royal vigilantism." The Communist takeover of Indochina in 1975 at the end of the Vietnam War convinced many that Thailand could be the next communist target and that the nation's unruly left-wing students were aiding the enemy.
The day before the massacre, a photo of a mock hanging by Thammasat demonstrators was published in the Bangkok press. To many, the students in the photo appeared to be hanging the Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn in effigy. In response, outraged paramilitary forces gathered outside the university that evening.
Lieutenant-General Chumphon Lohachala, deputy director of the national police, ordered an attack in the morning and authorized free fire on the campus. A junta headed by the defense minister, Admiral Sa-ngad Chaloryu, seized power immediately after the massacre. The membership of the junta was more moderate than that of Pramarn's faction and the relationship between the factions remains poorly understood. The junta appointed Tanin Kraivixien, a hard-line anti-communist and a royal favorite, as prime minister.

Background

People power establishes a democracy

Prior to 1973, Thailand for several decades had had a military dominated government with King Bhumibol Adulyadej serving as a ceremonial head of state. Student demonstrations on 14 October 1973 demanding a new constitution led to the "Three Tyrants" — Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, Field Marshal Praphat Charusathien, and Col. Narong Kittikachorn — fleeing the country and leaving it leaderless. The prestige of the king was greatly enhanced when he appeared to side with the demonstrators by appointing Sanya Dharmasakti, the highly regarded chancellor of Thammasat University, as prime minister. Although widely interpreted as a royal endorsement of democracy, the king was motivated mainly by the need to restore public order, since police had shot and killed 75 demonstrators. He remained wary of popular passions and began developing ties with anti-communist leaders. The student leftists, meanwhile, grew critical of the army's counterinsurgency campaign and even accused it of committing atrocities and blaming them on the communists. In December 1974, coup plotters brought Thanom back to Thailand, but he left almost immediately as public opinion was solidly opposed to a return of military rule at this time.
An elected, parliamentary government under Prime Minister M.R. Seni Pramoj, leader of the center-right Democrat Party, was established in February 1975. As there was no clear majority in parliament, the government was politically unstable, with Seni replaced in April by his more liberal brother M.R. Kukrit Pramoj, who led the center-left Social Action Party. An international economic downturn and the rise of student activism led to more strikes and farmer protests.

Anti-Communists prepare a crackdown

The communist takeover of South Vietnam following the Fall of Saigon in April 1975, and in particular the seizure of power in Laos by the communist Pathēt Lao in June, had a great effect on Thai public opinion. Many feared Thailand would be the next target of the Communists, and felt that left-wing activists were aiding the enemy. In August, Bangkok police went on a rampage through the Thammasat campus, a rehearsal for the later massacre. The abolition of the Laotian monarchy and the impresionment of the royal family in December 1975 shocked King Bhunibol and convinced him of the need for a crackdown on the Thai radical left. A military coup was impossible as long as Kukrit was backed by army chief General Boonchai Bamroongpong, a protégé of General Krit Srivara, a popular hero because of his role in the events of October 1973.
January 1976 was a month of upheaval, strikes and gigantic rallies that left the prime minister without a parliamentary majority, This convinced many formerly constitutionalist army officers that a coup might be necessary to restore stability. An increase in the price of rice provoked a general strike. Kukrit capitulated to the demands of the unions, and the right wing was outraged. A rally of 15,000 organized by the paramilitary group Nawapol and Defense Minister Pramarn demanded Kukrit turn power over to the military. The rally was led by the controversial Buddhist monk Kittivudho Bhikkhu, who bizarrely had stated that killing Communists was not a sin. A group of liberal MPs from the Democrat Party broke with the ruling coalition and joined with the left-wing opposition. Boonchai vetoed the idea of a left-leaning ruling coalition, forcing Kukrit to dissolve parliament and schedule an election for April 4. This was too close a call even for moderate army officers. The Laotian example of a left-leaning coalition government being taken over by communist was still fresh. Admiral Sa-ngad, the supreme commander of the armed forces, submitted plans for a coup. (The supreme commander outranks the army chief, but the position is less influential.) According to Paul Handley, the king replied the time was not appropriate. However, the king ssaid he thought Tanin Kraiwichien, a former Supreme Court judge and a right-wing radio host, would be the best choice for prime minister if a coup should become necessary.
In contrast to the Krit/Sa-ngad clique, Pramarn's group included plotters who had never completely accepted parliamentary government or the ouster of Field Marshal Thanom: right-wing Democrats, Chart Thai Party members, and officers of the Internal Security Operations Command (ISOC). The two coup plots would advance separately over the next few months, a re-emergence of the Krit vs Thanom army factionalism of 1973.

Order of battle

Several right-wing militia groups played major roles as perpetrators of the Thammasat student massacre. These groups were armed and trained by the army and by the Border Patrol Police beginning in late 1974 in preparation for a crackdown. Paul Handley, author of The King Never Smiles, a controversial biography of the king, describes the situation as "royal vigilantism". Thai Marxist writer Giles Ji Ungpakorn compared these groups to the fascist paramilitary groups of 1930s Europe. (Compare also to the Black Hundreds of Tsarist Russia.)
Nawapol (Thai: นว พล, power of nine) was founded in 1974 by Wattana Kiewvimol and used the slogan "Nation-Religion-Monarchy". The name also refers to King Bhumibol, the ninth king of the Chakri dynasty. This secretive group had about 50,000 members in mid-1975. The group received covert military assistance from ISOC and conducted advanced military training for its members at Jittiphawan College, a Buddhist seminary in Chonburi Province founded by the rightwing monk Kittivudho. This was said to include training in assassination, and the killing of a number of left-wing activists was attributed to Nawapol. Tanin, the post-coup prime minister, was a senior member of this group.
The Red Gaur (กระทิงแดง, Krating Daeng) was founded in 1974 by Special Colonel Sudsai Hasadin, an ISOC officer. In mid-1975, it numbered 25,000 members, mainly vocational students, a group which had played a major part in the demonstrations against Field Marshal Thanom, but had now broken with the leftist students over their apparent embrace of communism. The Red Gaur was Nawapol's youth division. Red is the colour of the former Thai national flag and is considered to represent a patriotism on the present banner. A gaur is a kind of wild buffalo. The group's slogan proclaimed it to be the "Anti-Communist Imperialism United Front". Like the SA in Germany in the 1930s, Red Gaur members provoked fights with left-wing activists and trade unionists. In February 1976, Red Gaurs threw bombs at a leftist protest, killing four students. At a highly publicized event, the king test-fired Red Gaur weapons.
The Volunteer Defense Corps or VDC (the Or Sor, also called the Village Scouts ลูกเสือชาวบ้าน,) formed in 1954 to provide law and order and emergency or natural disaster response, was expanded in 1974 when ISOC gained control,. It was extended to urban areas to counter left-wing political activism. A member of the royal family (often the queen) would present the identifying VDC kerchief to each village scout. At one point, 1 in every 5 Thai adults was a member of the Village Scouts.
When the leftist demonstrators took over the Thammasat University campus, the main organizations coordinating the activities were the National Student Centre and the Federation of Trade Unions.

Crisis in October

Thanom returns

Samak, a confident of the queen, flew to Singapore and told former military ruler Thanom that the palace had approved his return to Thailand. When Thanom returned on September 19, he denied political motive and stated that he came to Thailand only to do penance at his father's deathbed. He was ordained as a monk at Wat Bovornives, a temple closely associated with the royal family. The ceremony was illegally closed to avoid challenges to the ordination and the temple was ringed by the Red Gaur. When the king made a public visit to see Thanom, Prime Minister Seni responded by offering his resignation. This was rejected by parliament. Students protested Thanom's return at Sanam Luang in Bangkok on 30 September, but protests soon moved to the nearby campus of Thammasat University. Hoping to avoid a repetition of the police rampage that occurred the previous year, the university had canceled examinations and closed the campus. However, demonstrators broke down the gates to occupy the campus and stage a sit in. Forty-three labor unions demanded that the government expel Thanom or face a general strike.

Mock hanging provokes outrage

A photo of a mock hanging performed by the demonstrators at Thammasat was published on October 5 in two Bangkok newspapers, the English-language Bangkok Post and the vernacular Dao Sayam. Because the student actor who played the victim bore a certain resemblance to the crown prince, the demonstrators were accused of hanging in effigy a member of the royal family. It is sometimes claimed the photo was doctored to make the student resemble the crown prince, but all known surviving copies are identical. In reality, the mock hanging protested the murder of two trade unionists by police in Nakhon Pathom on September 25. On the army's Tank Corps Radio, Utharn Sanitwongs and other announcers accused the students of lèse majesté and chanted "kill them" and "kill the communists." Although the mock hanging has been the object of much attention, the organizers of the massacre would have found an alternative pretext had it not occurred. By the evening of 5 October, there were 4,000 royalist paramilitaries at the gates of Thammasat, where about 2,000 students were holding a sit in.

Police attack campus

At a cabinet meeting held early on October 6, Pramarn, leader of the Chart Thai Party and deputy prime minister, stated that the time had come to end the student movement once and for all. At about 5am the paramilitaries began to fire into the campus using military weapons. The Border Patrol Police shut all exits at about 7am. A dump truck smashed through the main gate and police rushed in at about 11am. Several students who were armed opened fire, but they were quickly overcome. Although the students pleaded for a ceasefire, Chumphon, the police commander, authorized free fire on the campus. Students who tried to surrender were forced to lie on the ground. Several were beaten to death and then hanged. Those who attempted to escape by jumping into the Chaophraya River were shot at from naval vessels. Wimolwan, a nursing student, was shot dead while trying to swim to safety. The attack lasted for several hours. Time described the event as a "A nightmare of lynching and burning":

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Suddenly the nightmare that Bangkok had dreaded was happening: a wild outbreak of kicking, clubbing, shooting, lynching. Youths hurled themselves into the river to keep from being shot. Then the blazing finale as a heap of gasoline-soaked bodies was set afire.

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About a thousand demonstrators were taken prisoner and humiliated by being stripped to the waist (though females were allowed to keep their bras on), made to crawl, or kicked. Female students allegedly were raped, alive and dead, by police and Red Gaurs. Officially, there were 46 dead and 167 wounded. Puey Ungphakorn, rector of Thammasat at the time of the massacre, gives an unofficial estimate of over 100 based on anonymous sources at the Chinese Benevolent Association, which disposed of the bodies. The massacre continued until noon, when it was halted by a rainstorm. It was "brutality of the utmost barbarity against workers, students and peasant activists," according to Giles. The Border Patrol Police, Red Gaur, Nawapol, and the Village Scouts rallied at the Royal Turf Club at about 4pm and proceeded to Government House, where they demanded and received Seni's resignation.
At 6:30pm, the National Administrative Reform Council (NARC), a 24-member military junta headed by Sa-ngad, seized power. Sa-ngad had been appointed defense minister by Seni on September 25. NARC was a group of moderate officers who acted to prevent Pramarn's extreme right-wing faction from seizing power. The fact that Chumphon was willing to go on record authorizing the shootings suggests he knew that a coup was imminent, as a civilian government would have prosecuted him.

Aftermath

Rise and fall of ultraroyalism

The coup was greeted with widespread relief because the crisis sparked by Thanom's return had created enormous anxiety. "It was the pattern of several previous coups...initiating violence, leaving the police to show they could not establish order, then allowing the military to step in," wrote Handley. This time the manipulation of public fear was particularly brazen since the king had introduced the catalyst for the violence by allowing Thanom to return, claims Handley. The outrage triggered by the photo of the mock hanging introduced a spontaneous element, but the pattern of training and recruiting paramilitary forces during the previous year showed that violence against leftists was planned well in advance. Four days after the massacre, says Handley, the crown prince distributed awards to paramilitary personnel involved.
On October 8, NARC appointed royal favorite Thanin Kraiwixien as prime minister. Disregarding the junta's "shortlist", Thanin picked a cabinet of the extreme right, including Samak as interior minister. Sa-ngad remained as defense minister and recently retired army chief Boonchai was appointed deputy prime minister. Three thousand suspected leftists were rounded up, all media was put under censorship, and membership in a communist organization was made punishable by death. There were sweeping purges of the universities, media, and civil service. Democracy would be restored gradually under a 12-year plan. This was the most fiercely royalist and anti-leftist government in Thai history, but it also cracked down hard on corruption. About 800 urban leftists fled to the Communist-controlled dorder areas after the coup. A wave of guerilla attacks followed, but these peaked in early 1977.
Thanin's ultranationlism quickly alienated almost every segment of Thai society, much to the surprise of the king. NARC staged another coup in October 1977 and replaced Thanin with one of its own members, Gen. Kriangsak Chomanan, who promised to speed up Thailand's return to democracy. The Communist Party of Thailand declined after Moscow-backed Vietnam invaded Beijing-allied Cambodia in 1979. This led to closer Sino-Thai relations and to a cutoff of Chinese aid for the Thai insurgents.

Massacre as history

None of the perpetrators of the 1976 massacre have been brought to justice and the issue is extremely sensitive in Thailand. The members of the junta have been amnestied, but there is no legal bar to prosecuting the other people who were involved. Many modern history textbooks in Thailand completely skip this event or include one-sided police reports from the time that claim student protesters had turned violent. Some play down the massacre as a 'misunderstanding' between the two sides, while even the most accurate are watered down versions of the event.
Thammasat University holds an annual event to display newspapers showing the atrocity, along with eyewitness accounts and historical records. A memorial was built on campus in 1996.
Samak was elected prime minister in 2008. When questioned about his role, he stated, "Only one died," and that one by accident. In an interview with CNN aired 9 and 10 February, the prime minister responded to questions about the massacre by saying he had been "an outsider by that time". He referred to, "One unlucky guy being beaten and burned in Sanam Luang". (This is a reference to artist Manas Siensingh, whose body was pulled from a pile of corpses and mutilated before cheering onlookers.)
An instance of a corpse being beaten with a chair is shown on the Single Cover, Holiday in Cambodia by the Dead Kennedys. The victim was a second year student from Chulalongkorn University.