Anwar Sadat

The third President of Egypt, and the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel.

He was born in a village in the Nile delta on the twenty-fifth of December 1918, one of thirteen children of a clerk and a Sudanese mother. He went to the military academy and joined the group of young officers around Nasser who took the country from the king in 1952. He spent two spells in prison before that for plotting against the British.

He became president in 1970 when Nasser died, and was written off as a caretaker. In October 1973 he sent the army across the Suez Canal on Yom Kippur and took back part of the Sinai. Egypt lost the war in the end, but the crossing itself restored something the country had not had since 1967, and it was the crossing that made what came next possible.

In November 1977 he flew to Jerusalem and spoke to the Knesset - the first Arab head of state to set foot in Israel. The Arab world expelled Egypt from the Arab League for it. He and Menachem Begin were given the Nobel Peace Prize together in 1978, and signed the treaty in Washington in 1979.

At home he grew harder. In September 1981 he had some fifteen hundred people arrested - Islamists, Copts, communists, journalists, anybody who had objected to the treaty. A month later he was killed by men from inside his own army.

He was shot on the sixth of October 1981 at the parade marking the eighth anniversary of the crossing. He was sixty-two. Three American presidents came to the funeral. Almost no Arab leader did.

His wife Jehan and their children.