Jan 5 (Reuters) – Following are some of the major events to have occurred on January 5:
1895 – French artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus, accused of being a traitor, declared unworthy to bear arms.
1922 – Irish explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton died. He made several expeditions to the Antarctic and died on the Falkland Islands.
1933 – Calvin Coolidge, 30th U.S. president, died. He was governor of Massachusetts and became vice-president in 1921.
1941 – Amy Johnson, British aviator, died. The first woman to fly solo from England to Australia in 1930, she died after her plane crashed in the Thames estuary.
1996 – Yahya Ayyash (the “Engineer”), elusive mastermind behind a wave of Islamist suicide bombings against Israel, was killed in Gaza, apparently by a booby-trapped cellular telephone.
1997 – Globe Exide Challenger yacht of British solo round-the-world yachtsman Tony Bullimore capsizes in the Southern Ocean.
2002 – A small plane flown by a 15-year-old student crashed into an office high-rise in Tampa, Florida after taking off from a nearby airport without clearance. The pilot was killed.
2006 – At least 76 people died when a four-storey building collapsed in the Muslim holy city of Mecca during the annual haj pilgrimage.
2007 – Japan’s “Cup Noodle” king Momofuku Ando, whose invention of instant noodles, a snack that has sold billions of servings worldwide since its launch, died. He was 96.
2010 – Base jumper Omar Al Hegelan sets record, free falling from world’s tallest building.
2014 – Historic Tripoli library destroyed by fire.
