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Dramatic Assassination Plots from History and Their Outcomes

Khalid Elhassan October 29, 2020 34 min

Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand - Austria-Hungary — The arrest of Gavrilo Princip after his shooting of Franz Ferdinand and his wife. BBC

4. A Terrorist’s Group Assassination Plot that Changed the World

Serbia’s Black Hand was a secret society that employed terrorism in a bid to free Serbs from Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule and unify them in a Greater Serbia. Austria-Hungary was the Black Hand’s main target, and the group sent terrorists across the border on operations to stir up trouble. Their greatest feat was the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in 1914. The result was World War I.

The 1903 coup saw the murder of Serbia’s king and queen. Le Petit Parisien

The Black Hand’s founders first came together in 1903, when junior officers, led by Captain Dragutin Dimitrijevic, better known as Apis, launched a coup that culminated in the murder of the Serbian king and queen. Following Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, an act the Serbs resented, the 1903 conspirators met with senior Serb officials to found a secret pan-Serbian organization. It aimed to liberate Serbs living under foreign rule via a coordinated campaign of propaganda, sabotage, terrorism, and other clandestine means. A furious Austria-Hungary forced Serbia, under threat of war, to back off.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.