Just like with some of Blade’s assassinations in my fantasy series, The Queen’s Blade,
not all real-life assassination attempts have gone according to plan – keeping
in mind that a big part of any assassination plan includes not being caught –
and not starting a World War!
I think it fitting to start with the assassination that unintentionally
started World War I. Danilo Ilić hired six young men
to assassinate Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The would-be assassins
waited for the archduke’s vehicle, but, when it arrived, the first two
assassins chickened out. Another of the six youngsters threw a bomb at the
convertible, but it bounced off the cover and blew up the wrong car, travelling
behind the archduke. The assassin tried to commit suicide, but the cyanide pill
he took failed to kill him, as did the river he jumped into to drown himself,
as it was only a few inches deep. A crowd pulled him out and beat him badly.
Later that day, the archduke went to the hospital to visit those the bomb had
wounded. Gavrilo Princip, one of the would-be assassins, who was only nineteen
at the time, saw the archduke’s car outside and shot him and his wife.
Jacob Johan Anckarström, Adolf Ribbing and
Claes Fredrik Horn planned the assassination of Sweden’s King Gustav III. King
Gustav was warned of the assassination attempt, but still attended a masked
ball as planned, thinking that his costume would hide his identity. Unfortunately
for him, his royal cape made his identity obvious, and he was shot by the three
masked assassins – whose masks didn’t hide their identity any better than King
Gustav’s had… the next morning, they were caught and decapitated.
In one of history’s more famous assassinations,
John Wilkes Booth and co-conspirators planned to assassinate President Abraham
Lincoln, Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward. Johnson’s
would-be assassinator chickened out, and Seward’s assassin inflicted multiple
stab wounds, but failed to kill him. Booth shot Lincoln in the middle of a
play, then, instead of trying to blend into the crowd, he leapt onto the stage
and shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!”
(Thus always to tyrants.)
One of the weirdest assassinations in history –
another surrounded by much rumour – was that of Grigori Rasputin aka the Mad
Monk. First, someone stabbed him in the stomach so badly his entrails came out,
but, amazingly, this didn’t kill the Russian mystic. Then Prince Felix Yusupov and
co-conspirators poisoned him, using enough cyanide to kill at least five men.
This, too, failed to kill Rasputin, so Yusupov shot him – three times. Still
not dead, Rasputin grabbed the man who had shot him and, trying to strangle
him, said, “You bad boy.” He eventually died when others at the scene shot him
and threw him into the river.
Last, but not least, in January 2013, Oktai
Enimehmedov pulled a gun on Ahmed Dogan, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms
leader – on live television. Before the gun went off, Enimehmedov was tackled
to the ground and arrested. It seems this wasn’t an actual assassination
attempt, however, and the twenty-five-year-old claims he merely wanted to show Enimehmedov
he wasn’t untouchable. Police said afterwards that the gun he had pulled on
Dogan was only a gas pistol loaded with pepper spray and suspected the party had
staged the whole thing for publicity, but not everyone agrees with this
suspicion. Watch the
video if you want to be gobsmacked!
No comments:
Post a Comment