Following are some of the major events to have occurred on April 15:
1912 – The passenger liner Titanic sank off Newfoundland on her maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg. Of the 2,200 passengers and crew aboard the supposedly unsinkable vessel, 1,523 lost their lives.
1980 – The French philosopher, writer and left-wing political activist Jean-Paul Sartre died. He was awarded, but declined to accept, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964.
1986 – U.S. planes bombed Tripoli and Benghazi, killing some 40 people including an adopted child of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The raids followed the deaths of two Americans in the bombing of a discotheque in Berlin, which the United States blamed on Libya.
1989 – Ninety-six people died in a match-day crush at the Hillsborough soccer stadium in Sheffield, northern England.
1990 – The enigmatic Swedish-born film star Greta Garbo died in New York.
1997 – In Saudi Arabia, a huge fire swept through a temporary camp housing Muslim pilgrims at the plain of Mena, near the holy city of Mecca, killing 343 people.
1998 – Pol Pot, former Khmer Rouge leader and architect of Cambodia’s 1975-79 “killing fields” regime, died of a heart attack.
2003 – Volkert van der Graaf, killer of the right-wing populist party leader Pim Fortuyn, was jailed for 18 years for the Netherlands’ first political assassination in more than three centuries.
2005 – A fire accidentally caused by a young woman after a row with her boyfriend swept through the six-storey Paris-Opera hotel, killing 23 people, 11 of them children.
2015 – Former NFL player Aaron Hernandez convicted of fatally shooting Odin Lloyd.
(Reuters)
