Sadat Assassinated: Cairo Parade Ends in Blood

Soldiers jumped from a military truck during the annual October War parade, sprinted toward the reviewing stand, and opened fire with automatic weapons and grenades. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who had been standing to salute the troops, was struck by multiple rounds and collapsed behind a row of chairs. The October 6, 1981, assassination — carried out on the anniversary of Egypt's proudest military moment — killed the man who had made peace with Israel and transformed the Middle East's strategic landscape. The assassins were members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli, who had been assigned to the parade unit despite intelligence warnings about extremist infiltration in the military. Islambouli's cell included three other soldiers and was motivated by Sadat's signing of the Camp David Accords with Israel in 1978 and his subsequent crackdown on Islamist organizations. A month before the attack, Sadat had arrested over 1,500 dissidents, journalists, and religious figures in a sweep that enraged both the religious right and the secular left. The attack lasted roughly two minutes. Islambouli and his accomplices emptied their magazines into the reviewing stand from close range, also wounding Egyptian Vice President Hosni Mubarak, Irish Defense Minister James Tully, and several foreign diplomats. Sadat was airlifted to a military hospital, where he was pronounced dead from massive internal bleeding caused by high-velocity rifle rounds. Sadat's decision to fly to Jerusalem in 1977 and address the Israeli Knesset had been one of the most daring diplomatic gestures of the twentieth century. The Camp David Accords that followed, mediated by President Jimmy Carter, returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt and established the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state. The treaty survived Sadat's death — Egypt has never revoked it — but it cost Egypt its leadership position in the Arab world and made Sadat a target. Mubarak, who succeeded Sadat, imposed emergency law that would last for thirty years. Islambouli and three co-conspirators were executed in April 1982. The Islamic Jihad organization that planned the assassination later merged with al-Qaeda, and its ideology continued to shape jihadist movements for decades.