List of Premature Obituaries - A

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• Alan Abel reported his own death in a skiing accident as an elaborate hoax on New Years Day, 1980 (1980) to get his obituary published in The New York Times.
  
• Ali Hassan al-Majid was supposed dead in April 2003 (2003-04), after British and US officials reported that he had died in an air strike in Basra; al-Majid had been seen going into the building that was attacked, and corpses of his bodyguards were positively identified, though there was less certainty about the identity of al-Majid's supposed corpse. After obituaries of the Iraqi general, politician and first-cousin of Saddam Hussein were published in many newspapers, reports then circulated that he had escaped by boat, and subsequently been seen joking with staff in a hospital in Baghdad. Al-Majid was captured several months later, and sentenced to death in 2007 (2007) for war crimes. He was hanged on 25 January 2010.
• Anthony John Allen, a serial criminal, faked his own suicide by drowning off Beachy Head (Britain's most notorious suicide spot) in 1966 (1966) to escape prosecution for theft, presumably resulting in his being declared dead. He in fact swam around the coast, retrieved dry clothes that he had hidden, and took up a new identity. However, his crimes continued, including further thefts and bigamy. In 2002 (2002) he was jailed for life for having murdered his wife and children in 1975.
• Rex Alston, the retired BBC sports commentator, garnered the unusual distinction of having his marriage announced in The Times after his obituary when that paper updated the sportsman's internal obituary file and accidentally published it in 1985 (1985). Alston, who was 84 at the time, lived for another nine years until his actual death in 1994 at the age of 93.
• Nnamdi Azikiwe, first president of Nigeria, was declared dead almost twenty years before he finally died. The Daily Times of Nigeria had an elaborate issue with a bold "ZIK IS DEAD" banner on its front page.