Reuters historical calendar-Oct 5

London, Oct 4 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on October 5 since 1900: 1908 - Bulgaria proclaimed its independence from the Ottoman Empire.

1910 - Portugal was declared a republic after a successful revolt against King Manuel II.

1914 - In one of the earliest air battles, French and German planes exchanged fire at the start of World War One.

1964 - Fifty-seven East German refugees sheltered in West Berlin after tunnelling under the Berlin Wall. It was the largest mass escape since the wall was built in 1961.

1983 - Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

1995 - US envoy Richard Holbrooke clinched a ceasefire agreement among warring factions in Bosnia.

1998 - The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee approved launching a formal impeachment inquiry against President Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

2000 - Demonstrators stormed the Yugoslav parliament building in Belgrade and opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica told a huge rally that President Slobodan Milosevic had been defeated.

2001 - Emilie Schindler, who with her husband Oskar helped hundreds of Jews escape Nazi death camps in World War Two, died.

She was 94.

2002 - The last of 21,666 Rwandan troops left the Democratic Republic of Congo, lifting hopes of peace in Africa's Great Lakes region.

2003 - Akhmad Kadyrov, a former Muslim cleric backed by the Kremlin, won Chechnya's presidential election by a landslide. He was assassinated in May, 2004.

2004 - US scientists Frank Wilczek, David Gross and David Politzer won the Nobel physics prize for explaining how the basic building blocks of nature, quarks, interact.

2004 - Nobel laureate Maurice Wilkins, the British scientist who played a key role in the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, died. He was 88. He was awarded the Nobel prize for medicine in 1962 with Francis Crick and James Watson.

2005 - A huge mudslide triggered by Hurricane Stan engulfed dozens of homes in Guatemala's Maya Indian highlands, killing some 2,000 people.

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