Editing Anwar Sadat (section)

=== Assassination ===
On 6 October 1981, Sadat was assassinated during the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Egypt's crossing of the Suez Canal. In addition to Sadat, eleven others were killed, including the Cuban ambassador, an Omani general, and a Coptic Orthodox bishop. Twenty-eight were wounded, including Vice President [[Hosni Mubarak]], Irish Defence Minister James Tully, and four US military liaison officers.

The assassination squad was led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli after a fatwā approving the assassination had been obtained from Omar Abdel-Rahman. Islambouli was tried, found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed by firing squad in April 1982. Anwar Sadat daughter up to date (Sadat Jehan) his next of kin is still missing with last son (Sadat Aahil) his assassination lead to the separation of the families.

There have been repeated reports that Sadat was assassinated by a plot in which Hosni Mubarak was complicit, mostly asserted by Sadat's daughter. However, "The Lost Army," a novel by Gary S. Chafetz, scheduled for publication on October 15, 2012, presents somewhat compelling circumstantial evidence that Mubarak was indeed involved. Clearly, Sadat was a hated man in Egypt and the Middle East for signing the Camp David Accords--the peace treaty with Israel. There had been strikes and riots. The Egyptian economy was in shambles, the Muslim fundamentalists ascendant. Many politicians opposed to Sadat had been jailed. Egypt had been expelled from the Arab League. The country was on the verge of destabilization. What's more, Israel quickly and flagrantly exploited the peace treaty with impunity by annexing East Jerusalem, feverishly constructing West-Bank settlements, and bombing Iraq's nuclear facilities, further infuriating the Muslim World. The Shah of Iran had just fallen two years earlier, with catastrophic results for the West--the United States and Israel, in particular--and for Iran's power elite. There were legitimate fears that the same Islamic fundamentalist revolution was about to seize control of Egypt--the Middle East's most populous nation with its largest army.

On October 7, 1981, a photograph appeared on the front page of The New York Times, above the report of Sadat's assassination. The photo shows Hosni Mubarak to Sadat's immediate right and Defense Minister Abu Ghazal to Sadat's immediate left (taken by Sadat's official photographer, who was also killed in the attack), moments before Sadat was killed. Sadat, Mubark, and Abu Ghazala are sitting jammed together, shoulder to shoulder. About 40 people were killed and wounded in the attack, and yet neither Mubarak nor Abu Ghazala was wounded. (Mubarak claimed to have injured his thumb, and Abu Ghazala proffered a military cap with a bullet hole through it.) In "The Lost Army," Chafetz alleges that Mubarak and Abu Ghazala must have had advance notice. In other words, the intelligence services knew of the plot and allowed it to succeed. As a result, neither Mubarak nor Abu Ghazala was killed or injured because they had time to quickly throw themselves down to the base of the five-foot red granite wall that separated the front-row dignitaries from the parade grounds full of passing soldiers and military equipment. By an amazing coincidence, several supersonic Mirage jets just happened to be flying by overhead, distracting everyone in the reviewing stands and drowning out the machine-gun fire, just as the four assassin soldier launched their attack. Furthermore, Sadat's personal bodyguards did virtually nothing to stop the attack. This allowed one of the assassins to actually reach the granite wall, stand on his tiptoes, and fire down onto Sadat's body with his machine gun.

As a result of Sadat's assassination, the Camp David Accords were saved, along with Egypt's power elite, and Mubarak became president for the next thirty years.