100 years since Assassination at Sarajevo

BELGRADE - Today marks 100 years since the June 28, 1914 assassination at Sarajevo of Archduke of Austria-Este Franz Ferdinand that Austria-Hungary used as an excuse for invading Serbia and starting World War One.

Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb and high-school student in Belgrade, was a member of the political and revolutionary youth organization Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna), created in Bosnia ten years earlier.

He carried out the assassination together with several other members of the organization, killing the archduke, heir to the Austrian throne. He also accidentally shot and mortally wounded his pregnant wife, Sophie Chotek, who was by his side.

Austro-Hungarian authorities accused the Kingdom of Serbia of being behind the assassination, although the plot was carried out without its knowledge. Vienna claimed that Young Bosnia had been under the control of the Black Hand, a Serbian secret terrorist organization headed by Dragutin Dimitrijevic, commonly known as Apis, and that the assassins had been trained in Serbia where they had also been given weapons.

Princip, who was born in the village of Obljaj near Bosansko Grahovo on July 13, 1894, was less than 20 years old at the time of the assassination, and in the consequent trial in Sarajevo, he could not be sentenced to death, but was given a sentence of 20 years in prison instead.

He served his sentence in an infamous prison in the Czech Terezin Fortress, where he died of tuberculosis. Due to squalid prison conditions, at the end of his life, he weighed only 40 kilograms. Gavrilo Princip found his resting place in a grave at the Chapel of Heroes of St Vitus in Sarajevo, erected shortly before World War Two.

Several years ago, Luidi Pozdek, an old...