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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

3. When Serbia Was a Full-Blown State Sponsor of Terrorism

Emblem of the Serbian Black Hand. Wikimedia

The Black Hand was established in 1911 to resume the Serb campaign against Austria-Hungary, oversee its activities, and establish and coordinate nationalist revolutionary cells in Bosnia. The organization trained guerrillas, saboteurs, propagandists, and assassins, and sent them into Austria-Hungary to destabilize it, and stir up nationalist resentment among its Serbian subjects.

Serbia became a full-blown state sponsor of terrorism. The Black Hand’s leadership was composed primarily of high-ranking Serbian officials and army officers, including the crown prince. The Serbian government was kept well informed of the group’s terrorist activities. By 1914, Apis was a colonel in charge of Serbia’s military intelligence and was the Black Hand’s primary mover and shaker. That year, he hatched a plot for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne.

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.