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Archeduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife are killed in Sarajevo
On June 28th, 1914, Archeduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were killed by an assasination team lead by Danilo Ilić of Young Bosnia, and organized by Black Hand leader Dragutin Dimitrijević.
Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the mulit-national Austro-Hungarian Empire, where he was a voice of liberal reform for the nation. He hoped to increase the stability of the Empire by granting important rights of self-determination to many ethnic minorities. He especially wanted to address the concerns of ethnic slavs living in the Empire to reduce tensions with neihboring nations such as Serbia and Russia.
Black Hand members such as Dragutin Dimitrijević were concerned that their plans to create a pan-Slavic nation would be harmed by the liberal moves of the Empire. Assasination was already a tool that the Black Hand used for political expression. Dimitrijević was himself directly responsible for King Alexander of Serbia and his wife's assasination in 1903, and the Black Hand group he lead, devoted to the unification of Serbia, had already touched off several Balkan incidents through violent action.
The actual killer of Ferdinand, Gavrilo Princip, was part of an assasination team that was organized to kill the Archduke. The team had prepared to bomb the Archduke's car, but this was unsuccessful. Princip was able though to shoot Ferdinand and his wife after the driver of the Archduke's car took a wrong turn and stalled trying to back up.
In later years the assasination would lead to a wide range of conspiracy theories, made worse by the hatred of the Archduke shown by Alfred, 2nd Prince of Montenuovo (the Emperor's Chamberlien) who turned the royal couple's funeral into an insulting farce, and because the Serbians had actually warned the Empire of the plot, knowing its full details from Dragutin Dimitrijević.
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