Reuters historical calendar - April 4

London, Apr 3 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on April 4 since 1900: 1918 - The second Battle of the Somme ended with German gains of some 60 km (40 miles) of territory at a cost of 150,000 Germans and 160,000 Allies killed or wounded.

1933 - The US Navy airship Akron crashed into the sea off New Jersey during a storm with the loss of 73 lives.

1939 - Faisal II acceded to the Iraqi throne on the death of his father, King Ghazi I.

1949 - The North Atlantic Treaty setting up a mutual defence alliance, NATO, was signed in Washington by the foreign ministers of the 12 participating powers.

1968 - The American civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

1975 - 155 children died when a US air force transport plane carrying Vietnamese orphans crashed on take-off in Saigon.

1979 - In Pakistan, ex-president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was hanged in Rawalpindi for conspiring to murder a political opponent.

1998 - A methane gas explosion at Ukraine's Skochinsky mine in Donetsk killed 63 people.

2001 - Sudan's deputy defence minister and 15 other military officials were killed when their plane crashed.

2002 - Angola's army and UNITA rebels signed a formal ceasefire in the capital Luanda to end a 27-year war in which about a million people died.

2003 - US forces seized control of Baghdad's Saddam International Airport and renamed it Baghdad International.

2005 - The Moldovan parliament elected communist Vladimir Voronin, a former ally of Moscow, to a second term as president.

REUTERS SY SP1210