1996 - UAE won the GCC snooker championship for the fifth consecutive year when they defeated Kuwait 4-1 in the final at Al Wasl Sports Hall in Dubai. UAE had effectively settled the issue after beating Bahrain 5-0. Bahrain finished runners-up with six points from three matches. UAE swept to a 4 -0 lead before Kuwait’s Ahmad Al Terkit turned the tables on UAE’s Rashid Al Mazroui, making his first appearance in the championship, to clinch the bronze for his team. The result deprived Qatar of a medal, which they would have won had the UAE blanked out Kuwait 5-0. There was pin-drop silence in the hall as the seventh and deciding game began. Sultan Saqr Al Suwaidi, Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Youth and Sports, presented the trophy to UAE team manager Sultan Al Joker.
Other important events
1792 - French Republic is proclaimed and the revolutionary calendar goes into effect.
1927 - Slavery is abolished in Sierra Leone in Africa.
1949 - The Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb.
1955 - Hurricane Janet, the most violent Caribbean hurricane of the season, kills 600.
1960 - A US Marine Corps DC-6 plane, en route from Japan to the Philippines, crashes in the ocean 290km south of Okinawa. All 29 passengers are killed.
1965 - A ceasefire is declared in the war between India and Pakistan, but both sides subsequently violate it.
1980 - Iraqi tanks enter Iran, marking the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War as a full-scale conflict.
1988 - UAE and Egypt sign an agreement setting up a joint cooperation committee.
1989 - Ten people are killed when an Irish Republican Army bomb rips through barracks in south-east London.
1994 - Former diplomat Jaafar Abdul Rahman is formally installed as Malaysia’s new king.
1996 - Typhoon Violet veers into the North Pacific after killing seven and setting off landslides, paralysing transportation in Japan.
1997 - A bloody slaughter in the Algiers suburb of Baraki kills 200 people.
1998 - Saudi Arabia expels the Afghan charge d’affaires and recalls its representative from Kabul.
1999 - Dutch journalist Sander Thoenes is killed and two others assaulted in separate attacks in East Timor.
2005 - Two bicycle bombs explode minutes apart in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore, killing at least six people.
2008 - South Africa’s ruling African National Congress names its deputy president Kgalema Motlanthe as head of state.
2011 - Former Indian cricket captain Mansour Ali Khan Pataudi dies at the age of 70.
2013 - Twin suicide bomb blasts at a church in Kohati Gate area of Peshawar kill more than 75 people.
2014 - Mubarak Rashid Khamis Al Mansouri is appointed UAE Central Bank Governor.
2015 - Yemeni President Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi flies to Aden after six months in exile in Saudi Arabia.
