Reuters historical calendar - April 15

London, Apr 14 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on April 15 since 1900: 1912 - The passenger liner Titanic sank on her maiden voyage off Newfoundland after hitting an iceberg. Of the 2,200 passengers and crew aboard the supposedly unsinkable vessel, 1,523 lost their lives.

1923 - At New York's Rialto Theatre, Lee De Forest screened a selection of musical shorts demonstrating his sound-on-film process, the first sound films to be shown to a paying audience.

1945 - British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany near the end of World War Two.

1952 - The Franklin Bank in New York became the first bank to issue a credit card.

1980 - Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher, novelist and poet, died. He was awarded, but declined to accept, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964.

1986 - US planes bombed Tripoli and Benghazi, killing some 40 people including an adopted child of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The raids followed the deaths of two Americans in a Berlin discotheque blast, which Washington blamed on Libya.

1989 - Ninety-six people died in a match-day crush at the Hillsborough soccer stadium in Sheffield, northern England.

1990 - Greta Garbo, enigmatic Swedish-born film star, died.

1997 - In Saudi Arabia, a huge fire swept through a temporary camp housing Muslim pilgrims at the plain of Mena, near the holy city of Mecca, killing 343.

1998 - Pol Pot, former Khmer Rouge leader and architect of Cambodia's 1975-79 ''killing fields'' regime, died of a heart attack.

2003 - Volkert van der Graaf, the killer of Pim Fortuyn, was jailed for 18 years for the Netherlands' first political assassination in more than three centuries.

2005 - A deadly fire, accidentally caused by a young woman after a row with her boyfriend, swept through the six-storey Paris-Opera hotel killing 23, eleven of them children.

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