Murders Which Shocked The World

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12th century Persian cult leader, Hassan-I-Sabbab, never would have believed that the small group of murderers-for-hire, that he famously led would lead to his being the root of the modern word assassin.  That was what he did for a living, but where his executions were completely impersonal, the most outrageous assassinations in history were anything but simply business.

In ancient Rome, before the Empire really took root, bloodshed was commonplace. The man mainly credited with founding that mighty empire ended up paying a heavy price. Political lives were often ended, prematurely, by jealous rivals, rulers being by no means immune from such assaults. Rivalries within factions often led to killings, by friends and families, just as much as by enemies, foes, but Caesar being slaughtered, on 15 March 44 BC was a lunacy that led to major unrest within Rome.  On the Senate floor, he was set upon by 60 of his colleagues in power, his body said to have been subjected to 23 knife wounds, one of which killed him.

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In the year of 1914, Europe was an area full of barely contained aggression between different states, needing nothing more than a push, in the right direction, for all hell to break loose. Heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, once very powerful, t Archduke Ferdinand powerfully influenced political opinions of the time.  He was shot dead, by 19 year-old Gavrilo Princip, of the revolutionary independence movement Young Bosnia, in Sarajevo, around noon on June 28 1914, the most destructive single pistol shot in history, leading to the deaths of more than 15,000,000 men during WWI, the young assassin escaped execution, dying of Tuberculosis.

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One of the most horrifying, and history changing killings of the last century took place on 30 January 1948, when Mahatma Ghandi, father of Indian independence and spiritual guide for millions, was shot three times during a prayer meeting in the grounds of Delhi’s Birla House. Nathuram Godse, a Hindu extremist, who felt maddened by Gandhi’s support for the partition, into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan, carried out this dreadful act. Godse had not the slightest notion of how deeply this outrageous killing would affect Indian society, to this day, a wound that just refuses to heal, for so many.

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 Ghandi and his mantra, of passive resistance to authority, brought about change in India, while at the same time, black US activists were fighting just as had for equal rights. Unrest was explosive, one man always making himself heard above the protests, that being Martin Luther King, who was undoubtedly the most important voice for black civil rights then, though his charismatic and inspirational life was cut short, by his being murdered on 4 April 1968. A fatal rifle shot in the neck, and Dr.King fell, dying at the hands of James Earl Ray, his killer. This untimely and senseless death,  in Memphis, Tennessee, led to riots across the USA, and, to this day, rumours of a  government-funded conspiracy refuse to go away, despite any convincing evidence to support the idea.

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The worst assassination of the century was witnessed, on worldwide TV, when John F Kennedy, President of the USA, was ruthlessly shot to death, on the rear seat of an open limousine in Dallas, Texas on 22nd November 1963.  Lee Harvey Oswald, a loser who had been a bit of a communist, himself shot to death 48 hours later by Jack Ruby, was the killer, yet, even half a century later, conspiracy theorists still debate this heinous crime, asking if government involvement played a part. Presidents have not ever been allowed to travel in open-top cars since Kennedy’s killing, an event  shaking western society to its very foundations, and one we can only hope will never be repeated. 

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All images used with permission