Assassination of Anwar Sadat Assassination of Anwar Sadat The assassination of Anwar Sadat occurred on 6 October 1981. Anwar Sadat, the President of Egypt, was assassinated during the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Operation Badr, during which the Egyptian Army had crossed the Suez Canal and taken back a small part of the Sinai Peninsula from Israel at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War. A fatwa approving the assassination had been obtained from Omar Abdel-Rahman, a cleric later convicted in the US for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The assassination was undertaken by members of the
Assassination of Anwar Sadat Minister James Tully, and four US military liaison officers. Security forces were momentarily stunned but reacted within 45 seconds. The Swedish ambassador Olov Ternström managed to escape unhurt. One of the attackers was killed, and the three others injured and arrested. Sadat was airlifted to a military hospital, where eleven doctors operated on him. He died nearly two hours after he was taken to the hospital. Sadat's death was attributed to "violent nervous shock and internal bleeding in the chest cavity, where the left lung and major blood vessels below it were torn." In conjunction with the assassination, an insurrection