How old is moammar

The bombing of Pan-Am flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in was the next significant escalation, causing the deaths of people in the air and on the ground, the worst single act of terrorism ever witnessed in the UK. Gaddafi's initial refusal to hand over the two Libyan suspects to Scottish jurisdiction resulted in a protracted period of negotiations and UN sanctions, finally ending in with their surrender and trial.

One of the men, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, was jailed for life, but the other was found not guilty. The resolution of the Lockerbie case, along with Gaddafi's subsequent admission and renunciation of a covert nuclear and chemical weapons programme, paved the way for a significant warming of relations between Tripoli and western powers in the 21st century.

The domestication of the erstwhile "mad dog" was held up as one of the few positive results of US President George W Bush's military invasion of Iraq in The argument went that Gaddafi had watched the fate of fellow miscreant Saddam Hussein, hanged by Iraqis after a US-instigated legal process, and had learnt a sobering lesson. It is perhaps more plausible to argue that the Libyan leader played his WMD card when he saw the benefits of forging strategic partnerships with the US and European powers.

He certainly paid little heed to Mr Bush's so-called "freedom agenda", which held that the US no longer held common cause with dictators and despots and that democracy and human rights were just around the corner. It was after all more or less business as usual between Washington and the other authoritarian Arab rulers whom the US called friends and allies.

With international sanctions lifted, Tripoli was back on the international political itinerary, allowing British Prime Minister Tony Blair , among other luminaries, to drop in at Gaddafi's famously luxurious Bedouin tent erected in his palace grounds. In true nomadic style, the tent also went with the colonel on trips to Europe and the US, although in New York state it fell foul of stringent zoning regulations on the estate of tycoon Donald Trump and had to be hastily dismantled.

Distaste about the alleged architect of Lockerbie's readmission into the world leaders' club lingered in many circles, not least among the US victims' families and their supporters. But that did not stop business deals being struck with a succession of western defence manufacturers and oil firms.

Ironically, it was on the Arab front that Gaddafi kept his black sheep status alive. Throughout the s, the normally staid proceedings of annual summits of the Arab League were almost guaranteed to be disrupted by the Libyan leader's antics, whether it was lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke into the face of his neighbour, or tossing insults at Gulf rulers and the Palestinians, or declaring himself "king of kings of Africa". The UN has also witnessed the colonel's eccentricity.

At the General Assembly, he gave a rambling speech more than an hour-and-a-quarter longer than his allocated minute time slot, tearing out and screwing up pages from the UN Charter as he spoke. When the winds of revolt started to blow through the Arab world from Tunisia in December , Libya was not at the top of most people's list of "who's next". Gaddafi fitted the bill as an authoritarian ruler who had endured for more years than the vast majority of his citizens could remember.

But he was not so widely perceived as a western lackey as other Arab leaders, accused of putting outside interests before the interests of their own people. He had redistributed wealth - although the enrichment of his own family from oil revenues and other deals was hard to ignore and redistribution was undertaken more in the spirit of buying loyalty than promoting equality.

He sponsored grand public works, such as the improbable Great Man-Made River project , a massive endeavour inspired, perhaps, by ancient Bedouin water procurement techniques, that brought sweet, fresh water from aquifers in the south to the arid north of his country.

There was even something of a Tripoli Spring, with long-term exiles given to understand that they could return without facing persecution or jail. When the first calls for a Libyan "day of rage" were circulated, Gaddafi pledged - apparently in all seriousness - to protest with the people, in keeping with his myth of being the "brother leader of the revolution" who had long ago relinquished power to the people. As it turned out, the scent of freedom and the draw of possibly toppling the colonel, just as Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's Ben Ali had been toppled, was too strong to resist among parts of the Libyan population, especially in the east.

Some of the first footage of rebellion to come out of Benghazi showed incensed young Libyans outside an official building smashing up a green monolith representing the spurious liberation doctrine that had kept them enslaved since the s - the Green Book.

As the uprising spread, and the seriousness of the threat to his rule became apparent, Gaddafi showed he had lost none of the ruthlessness directed against dissidents and exiles in the s and s.

It was the first American victory in the event since After advancing island by island across the Pacific Ocean, U. General Douglas MacArthur wades ashore onto the Philippine island of Leyte, fulfilling his promise to return to the area he was forced to flee in Just over a year after the start of the Long March, Mao Zedong arrives in Shensi Province in northwest China with 4, survivors and sets up Chinese Communist headquarters.

Cox had conducted a detailed investigation of the Watergate break-in that revealed that Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox.

Kennedy has a cold; in reality, he is holding secret meetings with advisors on the eve of ordering a blockade of Cuba. On October 20, , the U. Senate approves a treaty with France providing for the purchase of the territory of Louisiana, which would double the size of the United States.

At the end of 18th century, the Spanish technically owned Louisiana, the huge region west of the In the summer of , members of the rock band Aerosmith inspected an airplane they were considering chartering for their upcoming tour—a Convair operated out of Addison, Texas.

Concerns over the flight crew led Aerosmith to look elsewhere—a decision that saved one band but His father, an army officer, deserted the family when Rimbaud was six. Rimbaud was a brilliant student, and his first poem was published in a French review when he was The following year, he rebelled and ran On October 20, , Burt Lancaster, a former circus performer who rose to fame as a Hollywood leading man with some 70 movies to his credit, including From Here to Eternity and Atlantic City, in a career that spanned more than four decades, dies of a heart attack at the age of The speech caused a furore that fuelled the armed rebellion against him, and it has been since mocked in songs and spoofs across the Arab world.

Gaddafi came to power in after leading a bloodless coup, toppling King Idris, at the age of He maintained tight control of his oil-rich country for decades by clamping down on dissidents. He was born in in the coastal area of Sirte to parents who were nomads. He went to Benghazi University to study geography but dropped out to join the army. After seizing power, he laid out a pan-Arab, anti-imperialist philosophy, blended with aspects of Islam.

While he permitted private control over small companies, the government controlled the larger ones. He was an admirer of the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Arab socialist and nationalist ideology. He tried without success to merge Libya, Egypt and Syria into a federation. A similar attempt to join Libya and Tunisia ended in acrimony.

However, critics dismissed his leadership as a military dictatorship, accusing him of repressing civil society and ruthlessly crushing dissident. The regime has imprisoned hundreds of people for violating the law and sentenced some to death, according to Human Rights Watch. Gaddafi played a prominent role in organising Arab opposition to the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel.