The reviewing stand in Nasr City was full that morning — Sadat in uniform in the front row, Vice President Mubarak beside him, ministers and foreign guests in the rows behind, and the parade running past on schedule. Mirage jets came over trailing coloured smoke and most of the stand looked up; that was when a truck in the column stopped and men came out of it. Sadat was hit, along with a number of others in and around the stand. Eleven people were killed in all, among them the Cuban ambassador and an Egyptian bishop, and dozens were wounded.
He was flown to a military hospital and died there. This was 1981, eight years to the day after the crossing the parade was meant to mark, and three years after the Nobel he shared for Camp David. Mubarak, wounded in the hand, was sworn in within the week. The contact sheet here is from six years earlier, Salzburg, 1975 — Ford and Sadat indoors in dark suits, an honour guard waiting outside.
His memoir, In Search of Identity, came out in 1977, and it starts in Mit Abu al-Kum — the village, the canal, the people he grew up among — before any of the politics arrives.
The bishop killed in the stand was Coptic, which was noted at the time because Sadat had been in a long quarrel with the Coptic pope, Shenouda, and had confined him to a desert monastery a month before. At the funeral, three former American presidents came; few Arab heads of state did.