Reuters historical calendar - February 26

LONDON, Feb 25 (Reuters) Following are some of the major events to have occurred on February 26 since 1900.

1901 - The leaders of the Boxer Rebellion in China, Chi-hsui and Hsu Cheng-yu, were beheaded in public.

1916 - The Germans sank the French transport ship Provence II during World War One, killing 930 people.

1935 - Scottish inventor Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated the first practical version of radar.

1936 - Adolf Hitler opened the first factory to produce the ''People's Car'' the Volkswagen in Saxony.

1952 - Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced that Britain had produced its own atomic bomb and would test it in Australia.

1961 - Prince Hassan acceded to the Moroccan throne as King Hassan II following the sudden death of his father, Mohammed V.

1969 - Levi Eshkol, Israeli prime minister since 1963, died in office.

1980 - Egypt and Israel established diplomatic relations.

1986 - Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos and his entourage fled the country after a popular uprising.

1993 - A bomb at New York's World Trade Center killed six people and injured more than 1,000. Militant Muslims were later convicted on charges related to the bombing.

1995 - The British merchant bank Barings collapsed after losses run up in Singapore by trader Nick Leeson.

2001 - Bosnian Croat leader Dario Kordic was sentenced to 25 years in jail for crimes against humanity, the first senior politician to be convicted by the UN court in The Hague.

2001 - Ethiopia said it had completed the withdrawal of its troops from Eritrea, ending a two-year border war and paving the way for the full deployment of UN peacekeepers.

2002 - French author Francoise Sagan was found guilty of fiscal fraud and given a 12-month suspended jail sentence for not declaring some 830,000 euros to the tax authorities.

2002 - Lawrence Tierney, US ''tough guy film actor promoted as ''the handsome bad man of the screen'', died. Tierney spent his best screen years playing cold-hearted killers in thrillers like ''Dillinger'' and ''Born To Kill''.

2004 - Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski was killed when his plane crashed into Bosnian mountains in thick fog.

2004 - The United States lifted a 23-year-old travel ban on Libya after Tripoli's progress on getting rid of illicit weapons.

REUTERS SY PM1221