Tanks in the Soviet Union on Tajbeg Palace began; as planned, president Hafizullah Amin was killed. The Soviet military command at Termez, Uzbek SSR, announced on Radio Kabul that Afghanistan had been liberated from Amin's rule. According to the Soviet Politburo they were complying with the 1978 "Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Good Neighborliness" and Amin had been "executed by a tribunal for his crimes" by the Afghan Revolutionary Central Committee. That committee then elected as head of government former Deputy Prime Minister Babrak Karmal, and said that it had requested Soviet military assistance. Soviet ground forces, under the command of Marshal Sergei Sokolov, entered
Saad Akbar Babrak not widely known. It is stated in the official file on Liaquat Ali Khan that Akbar was an "Afghan national and a professional assassin." Saad Akbar Babrak Said Akbar Khan Babrakzai (died 16 October 1951) was possibly an Afghan Pashtun, according to the government sources, and an ultra-Pashtun nationalist, an assassin who assassinated the first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaqat Ali Khan, in Rawalpindi Punjab Province, on October 16, 1951. On October 16, 1951, during a public meeting, Sayed Akbar Khan shot Liaqat twice in a park in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The assassin was fatally shot by police officers seconds later.