Photo: Victor Hugo King
In 12th century Persia, Hassan-I-Sabbab could have had no idea that the small group of murderers-for-hire that he led would lead to eternal infamy for himself. It is widely believed today that the word 'assassin' is taken directly from this man's name. That is just what he was, but where his executions of victims were mostly impersonal, some of the most outrageous killings in history were anything but.
1.JULIUS CAESAR
Photo: maddog
Bloodshed was common enough in ancient Rome, before the Empire really got established. One man is credited with the foundation of that mighty empire, but he ended up paying a heavy price. Lives were often cut short by jealous rivals, and rulers were by no means immune. Factional rivalries frequently led to killings by friends and families as well as foes, but the killing of Caesar on 15 March 44 BC was an act of lunacy that led to major unrest. Attacked in the Senate by as many as 60 of his supposed colleagues, his body is said to have received 23 knife wounds, one of them fatal.
2. ARCHDUKE FERDINAND
Fast forward now to 1914, and Europe was a seething mass of barely contained aggression. It needed nothing more than a push in the right direction for all hell to break loose. As heir to the throne of the once formidable Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Archduke Ferdinand was a powerful influence in the politics of the day. Ferdinand was shot, by 19 year-old Gavrilo Princip of the revolutionary independence movement Young Bosnia, in the town of Sarajevo, around lunchtime on 28 June 1914. Having fired the most destructive shot in history - it led to the deaths of more than 15,000,000 - Princip escaped execution and died of TB. This killing set off a catastrophic chain of events which culminated in the declaration of the First World War two months later.
3.MAHATMA GANDHI
Photo: copyright expired
Two societies had already been rocked by infamous murders when, on 30 January 1948, Mahatma Gandhi, the father of Indian independence was shot three times during a prayer meeting in the grounds of Delhi's Birla House. The killer was Nathuram Godse, a Hindu extremist maddened by Gandhi's support for the partition of the sub-continent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. Godse could have had no conception of how deeply this outrageous killing would cut into Indian society, leaving wounds which to this day refuse to heal.
4.MARTIN LUTHER KING JR
As Gandhi had offered passive resistance to authority in order to bring about change in India, black activists in the USA were fighting hard for equal rights. The unrest was explosive, but one man could always make himself heard above the protests. Martin Luther King was undoubtedly the most important advocate for black civil rights at that time, but his charismatic and inspirational life was cut short by his murder on 4 April 1968. Taking a rifle shot in the neck, Dr. King died at the hands of James Earl Ray. The death in Memphis, Tennessee ignited scores of riots across the US and rumours of a right wing or government-funded conspiracy refuse to go away, despite a lack of convincing evidence.
5. JOHN F KENNEDY
Photo: pingnews
Perhaps the worst of them all was the awful reality of witnessing, on worldwide TV, the death of John F Kennedy, President of the USA, on the rear seat of an open limousine in Dallas, Texas on 22nd November 1963. He was murdered cold-bloodedly by Lee Harvey Oswald, a loser who had been a bit of a communist, and who himself was shot to death 48 hours later by one Jack Ruby. Even after half a century, the conspiracy theorists still fiercely debate the motives behind this heinous crime. Was there government involvement? We may never know, but presidents have never travelled in open-top cars since then. Kennedy's killing shook Western society to its very foundations. Let us hope we never see the likes of it again.
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