ON THIS DAY JULY 9

1401 Feared Mongol warlord Tamerlane (Timur) destroys Baghdad, killing 20 000 people, forming flaming pyramids of burning heads around the city.

1877 The first Wimbledon tennis championships begins.

1893 George Cato (79), Natal pioneer and first mayor of Durban, dies.

1893 Daniel Hale Williams performs the first successful open-heart surgery in the US – but without anaesthesia.

1917 The British battleship HMS Vanguard explodes at Scapa Flow, killing 804 sailors.

1922 Johnny Weissmuller swims the 100m freestyle in 58.6 seconds, breaking the world record and the ‘minute barrier’.

1943 The Allied invasion of Sicily begins, involving many thousands of South Africans, eventually leading to the downfall of Mussolini. The invasion forces Hitler to break off the Battle of Kursk with the Soviets.

1944 America takes Saipan, bringing Japan within range of B-29 raids, and causing the downfall of the Tojo government.

1959 An RAF Valiant sets a record for the London-cape Town flight of 11 hours, 27 minutes.

1982 Pan Am Flight 759 crashes in Kenner, Louisiana, killing all 145 people on board and eight others on the ground.

1987 Sixty-one whites, mainly from the Afrikaans community, meet the ANC in Dakar, in search of an end to apartheid.

1991 Suspended since 1964, SA rejoins the International Olympic Committee.

1995 The Sri Lankan Air Force bombs a church, killing 125 Tamil civilian refugees.

1995 Ex-police Commissioner Johan van der Merwe implicates Deputy President FW de Klerk in a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign against the ANC before the 1994 election.

2002 The AU, with Thabo Mbeki as its chairman, is formed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, replacing the Organisation of African Unity.

2006 An Airbus A310 passenger jet veers off the runway at Irkutsk, Siberia, with the crash killing 125 people.