Reuters historical calendar - January 9

London, Jan 8 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on January 9 in history: 1923 - Spanish inventor Don Juan de la Cierva made the first successful flight in an autogyro, forerunner of the helicopter.

1953 - A South Korean passenger ferry sank off Pusan with the loss of 349 lives.

1960 - Work started on the Aswan High Dam in Egypt.

1980 - Sixty-three Muslim militants were beheaded in Saudi Arabia for their part in the siege of the Great Mosque in Mecca in November 1979.

1996 - Chechen rebels seized some 2,000 hostages in a southern Russian town and threatened to kill them if their demands were not met.

2002 - Colombia's government ended three years of peace talks with FARC rebels, saying it was giving the leftist guerrillas 48 hours to vacate a demilitarised zone in the south of the country.

2004 - The families of 170 people killed in the 1989 bombing of a French UTA airliner, blamed on six Libyans, signed a 0 million compensation deal with Libya.

2004 - Turkey signed a protocol to abolish the death penalty even in wartime as it sought to meet criteria to begin entry talks with the EU.

2005 - Sudan's Islamist government and southern rebels signed a peace agreement on ending Africa's longest-running civil war, which had dragged on for 21 years.

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