Timeline Wednesday 27 February 2002

Events on Wednesday 27 February 2002 2

• 1918 – 2002 Spike Milligan (1918-2002) Died 27 February 2002, aged 83 Spike Milligan was the driving creative force behind The Goon Show, the anarchic BBC radio comedy of the 1950s that influenced generations of British humour. Born in India, he wrote surreal scripts, comic verse and a series of war memoirs. He spoke openly about the bipolar disorder that troubled him throughout his life.
• 2002 Godhra train fire and Gujarat riots Communal violence kills more than a thousand in India On 27 February 2002 a fire on a train at Godhra in Gujarat killed 59 Hindu pilgrims, and the cause was widely blamed on a Muslim mob. Over the following weeks retaliatory riots across the state killed more than a thousand people, most of them Muslims, and displaced tens of thousands. The state government led by Narendra Modi was accused of failing to halt the violence.