This Day in History: U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians in My Lai massacre

The following are some of the major events to have occurred on March 16:

1917 – Russia’s Grand Duke Michael, brother of Tsar Nicholas II who had abdicated the day before, refused to take the throne. A provisional government under Prince Georgi Lvov took office.

1930 – Spanish dictator Primo de Rivera died.

1937 – Sir Joseph Austen Chamberlain, British statesman, died. As British foreign secretary he negotiated the Locarno Pact in 1925 and won that year’s Nobel peace prize with U.S. Vice President Charles Gates Dawes.

1939 – Slovakia was placed under German “protection”; Hungary annexed Ruthenia, formerly part of Czechoslovakia.

1968 – U.S. soldiers killed at least 100 Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai in what became known as the My Lai massacre.

1978 – Red Brigades guerrillas kidnapped former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro. He was found dead on May 9, 1978.

1978 – The tanker Amoco Cadiz ran aground off France’s Brittany coast, spilling about 220,000 tons of oil.

1999 – All 20 members of the EU Commission resigned a day after a report into fraud and cronyism accused them of losing control over the Brussels bureaucracy.

2002 – Two men killed the unescorted Isaias Duarte Cancino, the Archbishop of Cali in Colombia, as he left the Buen Pastor Church. He had celebrated an evening mass wedding.

2005 – A Canadian judge cleared two Sikh militants of involvement in the 1985 downing of an Air India flight off the Irish coast — history’s deadliest bombing of a civilian airliner — and a related bombing in Japan. All 329 people on board the plane were killed, while two workers died in the attack at Tokyo’s Narita airport.

2006 – Iraq’s first full-term parliament since the U.S. invasion in 2003 convened, three months after being elected.

(Reuters)