rule: the first thing the Italians did was to create in the early 1920s a sewage system (that until then lacked) and a modern hospital. In the coast of the province was built in 1937–1938 a section of the Litoranea Balbia, a road that went from Tripoli and Tunisia's frontier to the border of Egypt. The car tag for the Italian province of Tripoli was "TL". Furthermore, in 1927, the Italians founded the Tripoli International Fair,with the goal of promoting Tripoli's economy. This is the oldest trade fair in Africa. The so-called Fiera internazionale di Tripoli was one of the main international "Fairs" in the colonial world in the 1930s, and was internationally promoted together with the Tripoli Grand Prix as a showcase of Italian Libya. The Italians created the Tripoli Grand Prix, an international motor racing event first held in 1925 on a racing circuit outside Tripoli. The Tripoli Grand Prix took place until 1940. The first airport in Libya, the Mellaha Air Base was built by the Italian Air Force in 1923 near the Tripoli racing circuit. The airport is currently called Mitiga International Airport. Tripoli even had a railway station with some small railway connections to nearby cities, when in August 1941 the Italians started to build a new railway (with a gauge, like the one used in Egypt and Tunisia) between Tripoli and Benghazi. But the war stopped the construction the next year. Tripoli was controlled by Italy until 1943 when the provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica were captured by Allied forces. The city fell to troops of the British Eighth Army on 23 January 1943. Tripoli was then governed by the British until independence in 1951. Under the terms of the 1947 peace treaty with the Allies, Italy relinquished all claims to Libya. Gaddafi era Colonel Muammar Gaddafi became leader of Libya on 1 September 1969. On 15 April 1986, U.S. President Ronald Reagan ordered major bombing raids, dubbed Operation El Dorado Canyon, against Tripoli and Benghazi, killing 45 Libyan military and government personnel as well as 15 civilians. This strike followed US interception of telex messages from Libya's East Berlin embassy suggesting the involvement of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in a bomb explosion on 5 April in West Berlin's La Belle discothèque, a nightclub frequented by US servicemen. Among the alleged fatalities of the 15 April retaliatory attack by the United States was Gaddafi's