Today in History: 129 Ghanaian football fans die in a stampede Accra Sports Stadium Disaster

The following are some of the major events to have occurred on May 9:

1901 – Australia’s first parliament opened in Melbourne.

1926 – Americans Richard E. Byrd and Floyd Bennett became the first people to fly over the North Pole.

1927 – Canberra replaced Melbourne as the capital of Australia.

1945 - World War II: The Soviet Union marks Victory Day.

1960 - US becomes the first country to legalize the birth control pill.

1978 – The body of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro was found in the boot of a car in Rome; he had been kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades.

1986 – Sherpa Tenzing Norgay died; he shared with Edmund Hillary the achievement of being the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 1953.

2001 – A total of 126 people died after a stampede at Accra’s main soccer stadium when police fired teargas at rioting fans. It was Africa’s worst soccer disaster.

2001 – Nicos Sampson, leader of a brief Greek-inspired coup which prompted the 1974 Turkish intervention in Cyprus, died aged 66.

2001 - Accra Sports Stadium Disaster: 129 Ghanaian football fans die in a stampede caused by the firing of teargas by police following a decision by the referee in a crucial match between arch-rivals Accra Hearts of Oak and Kumasi Asante Kotoko.

2002 – A radio-controlled landmine exploded in Kaspiisk in the southern Russian republic of Dagestan killing 42 people and wounding 150 during a Victory Day parade.

2004 – Chechnya’s Moscow-backed president, Akhmad Kadyrov, was killed when a bomb blast tore through a packed stadium in Grozny.

2014 – 111-year-old Alexander Imich certified as world’s oldest living man.

2015 – Russia’s Victory Day parade in Moscow marks 70th anniversary of end of World War Two.

(Reuters)