Reuters historical calendar - January 13

London, Jan 12 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on January 13 in history: 1915 - 30,000 people died in a huge earthquake in the central Italian town of Avezzano.

1941 - The Irish author James Joyce, whose works included the masterpiece ''Ulysses'', died in Zurich, Switzerland.

1963 - Sylvanus Olympio, president of the Republic of Togo, was killed in an army coup led by Nicolas Grunitzky; Grunitzky was ousted by Gnassingbe Eyadema on the same date in 1967.

1991 - In a crackdown on rebel Lithuania, Soviet troops backed by tanks stormed the main television station in the capital Vilnius, killing at least 11 people.

1993 - Former East German leader Erich Honecker left a Berlin prison to fly to Chile after a court trying him over the killings of citizens trying to flee across the Berlin Wall freed him because he was dying.

2001 - A quake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale shook Central America, with an epicentre just south of San Salvador.

At least 725 people were killed.

2002 - Gregorio Fuentes, the weather-beaten captain of the American novelist Ernest Hemingway's boat in Cuba and inspiration for ''The Old Man And The Sea'', died aged 104.

2003 - Afghanistan acceded to the International Criminal Court (ICC), opening the way for the extradition and trial of warlords accused of human rights abuses.

2004 - Britain's most prolific serial killer, Harold Shipman, convicted in 2000 of murdering 15 of his patients, was found hanged in his cell.

2005 - Mark Thatcher, son of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, pleaded guilty to a role in a foiled coup in Equatorial Guinea under a plea bargain that spared him prison.

REUTERS PDM RAI1349