Following are some of the major events to have occurred on April 17:
1957 – Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus arrived back in Athens after a 13-month exile in the Seychelles.
1961 – U.S.-backed exiles attempted to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The attempt failed after a three-day battle in which 100 were killed and over 1,000 captured.
1970 – The U.S. spacecraft Apollo 13 splashed down after its near-disastrous trip to the moon.
1975 – Khmer Rouge guerrillas seized the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh and began a reign of terror in which more than one million people died.
1993 – Turgut Ozal, president of Turkey from 1989, died of a heart attack.
1997 – Former president Chaim Herzog, who defended Israel on the battlefield, chronicled its history and championed its cause at the United Nations, died aged 78.
2001 – Two Rwandan nuns were among four people charged with taking part in a 1994 massacre who went on trial in Brussels.
2002 – Xanana Gusmao, a former guerrilla leader, was declared the landslide winner of East Timor’s first presidential election. It became the world’s newest nation on May 20.
2004 – An Israeli helicopter missile strike killed top Hamas leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi. Rantissi had depicted himself as a Hamas politician with no links to the military wing. Israel accused him of being a top decision-maker on attacks.
2005 – Mehmet Ali Talat was elected Turkish Cypriot leader, winning 56 percent of the vote in a poll to succeed the hawkish nationalist Rauf Denktash.
2013 – Massive explosion at fertilizer plant in Waco, Texas.
(Reuters, Photo: Sjoberg / AFP / Getty Images)
