On 6 October 1981, Field Marshal Anwar Sadat, the 3rd President of Egypt, was assassinated during the annual victory parade held in Cairo to celebrate Operation Badr, during which the Egyptian Army had crossed the Suez Canal and taken back the Sinai Peninsula from Israel at the beginning of the Yom Kippur War.

According to interviews and information gathered by journalist Lawrence Wright, the group was recruiting military officers and accumulating weapons, waiting for the right moment to launch "a complete overthrow of the existing order" in Egypt.

Chief strategist of El-Jihad was Abbud al-Zumar, a colonel in the military intelligence whose "plan was to kill the main leaders of the country, capture the headquarters of the army and State Security, the telephone exchange building, and of course the radio and television building, where news of the Islamic revolution would then be broadcast, unleashing—he expected—a popular uprising against secular authority all over the country.

[11] The roundup missed a jihad cell in the military led by Lieutenant Khalid Al-Islambouli, who would succeed in assassinating Anwar Sadat that October.

Members of the Group's "Majlis el-Shura" ("Consultative Council")—headed by the famed "blind shaykh"—were arrested two weeks before the killing, but they did not disclose the existing plans, and Islambouli succeeded in assassinating Sadat.

[13] On 6 October 1981, a victory parade was held in Cairo to commemorate the eighth anniversary of Egypt's crossing of the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War.

Samir Helmy Ibrahim, Mohammed Yousuf Rashwan (the presidential photographer), Saeed Abdel Raouf Bakr, and Chinese engineer Zhang Baoyu,[15] as well as the Cuban ambassador to Egypt and Coptic Orthodox bishop Anba Samuel [de] of Social and Ecumenical Services.

[16] Twenty-eight were wounded, including Vice President Hosni Mubarak, Irish Defence Minister James Tully, Sayed Marei, advisor to Anwar Sadat, Belgian ambassador Claude Ruelle, Coptic Bishop Samuel and four United States Armed Forces liaison officers.

[21] Sadat's death was attributed to "violent nervous shock and internal bleeding in the chest cavity, where the left lung and major blood vessels below it were torn.

Government control was not restored until paratroopers from Cairo arrived and the Air Force scrambled a pair of jets to intimidate the militants.

The state newspaper of Syria, Tishreen, carried the headline "Egypt Today Bids Farewell to the Ultimate Traitor," while Iran named a street in Tehran after Islambouli.

[20] Sadat was initially succeeded by Sufi Abu Taleb, Speaker of the People's Assembly, who assumed office as acting President and immediately declared a state of emergency.