In August 1998, more than 200 people were killed in co-ordinated bomb attacks on two US embassies in East Africa. They were among the first major attacks linked to Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network. We hear from George Mimba who was working inside the embassy in Kenya when the bomb detonated.

Photo: Rescue workers at the scene of the Nairobi embassy bombing (AFP/Getty Images)

When the Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan agreed to go and interview Osama bin Laden in 1996 he was apprehensive. By the time he reached the Al-Qaeda leader's mountain hideout - he was shaken and scared - but what was the man himself really like? Claire Bowes reports.

This programme is a rebroadcast.

Photo: Osama bin Laden. Credit:AFP/Getty Images

In 1979 Islamist militants seized control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam. Hundreds were killed as Saudi security forces battled for two weeks to retake the shrine. The militants were ultra-conservative Sunni Muslims who believed that the Mahdi, the prophesied Redeemer, had emerged and was a member of their group. The BBC's Eli Melki spoke to eyewitnesses who were inside the Grand Mosque during the siege.

Photo: Fighting at the Grand Mosque in Mecca after militants seized control of the shrine, November 1979 (AFP/Getty Images)

On 12th April 1981, the space shuttle Columbia made history becoming the first ever reusable space craft to fly into orbit. It marked the start of a 30-year shuttle programme which revolutionised the history of manned space exploration. Using NASA and BBC archive we tell the story of this historic test flight.

The National Rifle Association represents gun owners in the USA. In 1977 it faced a turning point when its members revolted against the organisation’s leadership to concentrate on political lobbying in Washington. Would the gun lobby in America be as strong as it is, without the 1977 turnabout? Bob Howard talks to John Aquilino, a former NRA spokesman, who was at the historic meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio.

National Rifle Association Holds Its Annual Conference In Dallas, Texas. DALLAS, TX - MAY 05 2018. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

In 2011, an American man shot dead two people in the streets of Lahore. The crisis that ensued saw accusations of espionage and US-Pakistani relations brought to the brink. For Witness History, Josephine Casserly tells the extraordinary story of the Raymond Davis incident.

In 1970, the Republican president Richard Nixon signed a bill returning a sacred lake to the people of Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. The lake, and surrounding land, had been taken from the Taos people in 1906 and turned into a national forest, even though it was central to their centuries-old cultural rituals and beliefs. The return of the lake was the first time the US government had given land back to a Native American community. Louise Hidalgo talks to Laura Harris and her mother LaDonna Harris, who with her senator husband helped the Taos people get the Blue Lake back.

Picture: President Nixon signing the Blue Lake bill in the presence of Taos leaders, 15th December 1970 (Credit: UPI/Getty Images)

In April 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official in charge of concentration camps, was put on trial in Israel.The trial helped reveal the full details of the holocaust in which millions of European jews were killed during World War Two. One of the prosecutors, Gabriel Bach, spoke to Lucy Williamson for Witness History.

This programme is a rebroadcast.

PHOTO: Eichmann in the dock. (AFP/Getty Images)

The Mosuo community in China’s Himalayan foothills is matrilineal, so a family’s ‘bloodline’, inheritance and power is passed down through the female side. There is no such thing as marriage and monogamy is actively discouraged. The women rule and the men don’t mind. Rebecca Kesby has been speaking to Choo Wai Hong, a Singaporean corporate lawyer who came across the community as she travelled through her ancestral homeland of China. She liked it so much she learnt the language and built a house there.

South Asian vultures started dying in huge numbers in the 1990s but no one knew why. They were on the verge of extinction before scientists worked out what was killing them. Bob Howard has been hearing from Munir Virani of the Peregrine Fund, who discovered that the vultures’ livers were being damaged when they fed on the carcasses of cattle which had been treated with a widely-used painkiller.

White-backed vultures in their enclosure at the Vulture Conservation Centre run by World Wide Fund for Nature-Pakistan (WWF-P) in Changa Manga. September 20, 2017. Credit: ARIF ALI/AFP via Getty Images