Dec 24 (Reuters) – Following are some of the major events to have occurred on December 24:
1942 – An assassin killed Admiral Francois Darlan, a senior figure in France’s collaborationist Vichy government.
1989 – Deposed Panamanian strongman General Manuel Antonio Noriega turned himself in to the papal envoy and asked for political asylum.
1994 – Fundamentalist Muslim guerrillas hijacked a French airliner at Algiers airport, killing two people.
1995 – An Islamic party, Welfare, won a general election for the first time in Turkey’s 72-year secular history.
1997 – A Paris court jailed guerrilla mastermind Carlos “The Jackal” for life for killing two French secret agents.
1999 – Maurice Couve de Murville, longest-serving French foreign minister who later became prime minister, died at 92.
1999 – Ivory Coast’s army overthrew elected President Henri Konan Bedie in a coup.
2000 – Mini-Cooper creator John Cooper dies.
2001 – Israel barred Palestinian President Yasser Arafat from making his annual Christmas visit to Bethlehem, insisting he crack down on Palestinian militants.
2003 – The Italian food giant Parmalat, embroiled in one of Europe’s biggest corporate scandals, filed for bankruptcy protection after the discovery of a 7 billion euro hole in its accounts.
2008 – Harold Pinter, the British playwright and Nobel laureate famous for his brooding portrayals of domestic life and barbed politics, died aged 78.
