Egypt's president Anwar Sadat was shot dead in Cairo on October 6, 1981, while watching the annual military parade that marked the crossing of the Suez Canal eight years earlier. He was in the open. A truck in the column halted in front of the reviewing stand, and Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli jumped down with three men, threw grenades, and then fired into the stand. Sadat and ten other people were killed and about 28 were wounded.
The attack was planned by Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group that had broken away from the Muslim Brotherhood and had been collecting weapons for months. Its members objected to three things in particular: the peace treaty with Israel signed in March 1979, the expulsion of Egypt from the Arab League that followed it, and the mass arrests Sadat had ordered the month before, which took in Islamists, Marxists, journalists, the head of the Coptic church and much of the legal opposition at once. Sadat had known the risk. He was wearing his parade uniform that day and not the vest his guards wanted him to put on.
Hosni Mubarak, the vice president, was sitting two seats away. Mubarak was hit too. He became president and kept his predecessor's foreign policy intact. Islambouli and four others were executed in April 1982, and the cleric whose writing had justified the killing, Muhammad Abd al-Salam Faraj, was hanged with them.
The break with the Arab world that Sadat had accepted was reversed slowly: Egypt was readmitted to the Arab League in 1989, and the Arab League's headquarters went back to Cairo in 1990. Mubarak stayed in office until the uprising of 2011. The peace treaty signed in 1979 has outlived the man who signed it, two intifadas, a change of dynasty in Jordan, and every change of government in Cairo since, and Egypt and Israel still exchange ambassadors under it.