PASSINGS

Here are some of the world figures who died in 1992:

Political leader Roberto D’Aubuisson, 48, who founded El Salvador’s ruling party and was accused of leading right-wing death squads, died in February of a heart attack; he had been suffering from throat cancer.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, 78, who led Israel to its first formal peace with an Arab state and later directed a war in Lebanon that was Israel’s most divisive, died in March in a Tel Aviv hospital after suffering a heart attack.

The alluring “Blue Angel,” German-born actress Marlene Dietrich, 90, who entertained Allied troops during World War II and whose femme fatale attraction graced motion picture screens in the glamorous ‘30s and ‘40s, died in May in Paris, where she had lived as a recluse.

Former Chinese President Li Xiannian, 82, a hard-line opponent of the economic reforms under way in the Communist nation, died in June in Beijing of an unspecified illness, the first to die among the group of eight party elders--the so-called “immortals”--believed to direct the country from behind the scenes.

Former German leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Willy Brandt, 78, who resigned as chancellor after an aide was revealed to be a Communist East German spy, died in October near Bonn; he had suffered from intestinal cancer.

Petra Kelly, 44, stepdaughter of a U.S. colonel who became the voice of Germany’s anti-nuclear campaign in the 1980s and who founded the Green Party, was found dead in October along with her lover, Gert Bastian, 69, who apparently shot her in their Bonn home before taking his own life.

Alexander Dubcek, 70, the Communist leader who became the moving force behind Czechoslovakia’s reformist “Prague Spring” of 1968 and who later returned to public life after the “velvet revolution” ousted the Communist regime, died in a Prague hospital in November of injuries from a car accident.