Major attacks on US diplomats worldwide

BENGHAZI: A timeline of attacks on US envoys and diplomatic missions since 1976:

- June 1976: US ambassador to Lebanon Francis Melloy, along with the economic attache and the embassy's driver are abducted and killed several months after the civil war broke out.

- February 14, 1979: The US ambassador to Afghanistan, at the time ruled by a pro-Soviet regime, is kidnapped by a radical faction and then killed in an exchange of fire hours later when government security forces try to free him.

- 1979-1981: Following the Islamic revolution in Iran, students storm the US embassy in Tehran and take the 52 diplomats and other staff inside hostage. The hostage crisis lasts 444 days, with the last diplomats being freed in January 1981.

- April 18, 1983: During the civil war in Lebanon, a huge bomb destroys the US embassy building in Beirut, killing 63 people including 12 Americans.

- September 20, 1984: A car-bomb explodes outside a US embassy annex in Beirut, killing 24 people and injuring around 50. The US and British ambassadors to Lebanon are slightly injured.

- August 7, 1998: Massive car-bombs explode outside US embassies in the capitals of Kenya and Tanzania. A total of 224 people die and around 1,000 are injured, almost all of them Africans. The attacks, which are claimed by the Al-Qaeda group, kill 12 Americans in Nairobi.

- January 29, 2005: A rocket fired by insurgents in Iraq hits the heavily-protected US embassy in Baghdad. Two Americans are killed, neither of them diplomats.

- March 2, 2006: A suicide car-bombing close to the US consulate in the Pakistani city of Karachi kills five people, one of them a US diplomat.

- September 3, 2012: At least two people die when suicide bombers ram their car into a US diplomatic vehicle in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. The US says two Americans are injured.

- Tuesday September 11: The US ambassador to Libya and three other Americans are killed when an angry crowd storms the US consulate in the Libyan city of Benghazi. The protesters were angered by a US-produced film ridiculing Islam.