From Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny to British actress Maggie Smith and US music titan Quincy Jones , here are some of 2024’s most notable deaths. February – 4: HAGE GEINGOB, Namibia’s President and its first post-independence prime minister, aged 82 – 9: ROBERT BADINTER, France’s former justice minister who ended capital punishment in 1981, 95 – 16: ALEXEI NAVALNY, the top opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in prison aged 47, after over three years behind bars – 29: ALI HASSAN MWINYI, former Tanzanian president, who introduced multi-party democracy, 98 March – 1: IRIS APFEL, New York fashion celebrity known as the “geriatric starlet”, 102 – 1: AKIRA TORIYAMA, creator of Japan’s “Dragon Ball” manga and anime cartoons, 68 April – 2: MARYSE CONDE, French writer, chronicler of the lives of the descendants of Africans taken as slaves to the Caribbean, 90 – 8: PETER HIGGS, British physicist whose theory of a mass-giving particle — the so-called Higgs boson — jointly earned him the Nobel Physics Prize, 94 – 10: O.J.
SIMPSON, ex-American football star acquitted in 1995 following the televised “Trial of the Century” of the murder of his ex-wife and her male friend. A 1997 civil trial found Simpson liable and he then served nearly nine years in prison for a bungled 2007 armed robbery, 76 – 30: PAUL AUSTER, American novelist who wrote “The New York Trilogy”, 77 May – 9: ROGER CORMAN, American B-movie filmmaker, 98 – 13: ALIC.
