Reuters historical calendar - April 30

London, Apr 29 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on April 30 in history: 1900 - American railroad engineer Casey Jones died saving passengers as the Cannonball Express was about to crash.

1934 - A dictatorship was set up in Austria under Engelbert Dollfuss.

1945 - Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin.

1973 - President Nixon made a televised statement on Watergate, accepting responsibility for the bugging that took place at the Washington apartment complex in 1972.

1975 - In South Vietnam, President Duong Van Minh announced an unconditional surrender to the Vietcong, ending the 20th century's longest conflict.

1980 - In London, gunmen seized the Iranian embassy, demanding the release of political prisoners in Iran. The siege lasted six days.

1989 - The Italian film director Sergio Leone died. He was best known for his ''Spaghetti Westerns'' starring Clint Eastwood, including ''A Fistful of Dollars''.

1990 - American hostage Frank Reed was freed in Lebanon after nearly four years in the hands of pro-Iranian kidnappers.

1991 - Major-General Justin Lekhanya, Lesotho's military strongman, was ousted in an army coup.

1992 - Mutinous soldiers overthrew Sierra Leone President Joseph Momoh.

1996 - A Spanish court formally cleared Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez of links to a ''dirty war'' against Basque separatists in the 1980s.

1998 - Secessionist rebels signed a permanent ceasefire with the Papua New Guinea government, ending a nine-year uprising on the island of Bougainville.

1999 - The army in the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean seized power to preserve the unity of the republic in the face of a secession crisis.

2000 - Poul Hartling, a former Danish premier who became U.N.

High Commissioner for Refugees in 1978 and accepted the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1981, died.

2002 - Zimbabwe's President Mugabe declared a nationwide ''state of disaster'' as a food crisis threatened thousands with starvation.

2002 - Thirteen senior Tunisian army officers were killed in a helicopter crash in the north of the country in what was described as the worst air accident there since independence.

2003 - Libya accepted responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, which killed 259 people on board a Pan Am flight to New York in 1988, and 11 more on the ground.

REUTERS SHB VC1110