List of Famous people who died at 40

Saeed Hanaei or Said Hanai was an Iranian serial killer.

Melchior Ndadaye was a Burundian intellectual and politician. He was the first democratically elected and first Hutu president of Burundi after winning the landmark 1993 election. Though he moved to attempt to smooth the country's bitter ethnic divide, his reforms antagonised soldiers in the Tutsi-dominated army, and he was assassinated amidst a failed military coup in October 1993, after only three months in office. His assassination sparked an array of brutal tit-for-tat massacres between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups, and ultimately sparked the decade-long Burundi Civil War.

Dmitry Svetushkin was a Moldovan chess player. He was awarded the title Grandmaster by FIDE in 2002.

Yevgen Sotnikov was a Ukrainian judoka.

Patrick Haemers was a Belgian criminal who was head of a gang which carried out robberies of security vans and kidnapped former Belgian prime minister Paul Vanden Boeynants.

Roger Rivière was a French track and road bicycle racer. He raced as a professional from 1957 to 1960.

Alicia Domon, Caty, was a Roman Catholic religious sister from France who was one of two French nationals in Argentina to be "disappeared" in December 1977 by the military dictatorship of the National Reorganization Process. She was among a dozen people associated with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights group, who were kidnapped and taken to the secret detention center at ESMA.

Tsai Chen-chou was a Taiwanese politician and businessman.

Abdul-Halim Salamovich Sadulayev was the fourth President of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria. Sadulayev served little more than a full year as President before being killed in a gun battle with FSB and pro-Russian Chechen forces.