Infamous Assassinations

Munich 1934: The Night of The Long Knives Flying into Munich in the early hours of 20th June 1934, Adolf Hitler, then Chancellor of Germany, drove to a fashionable lakeside hotel,...

London, 1974 As the Queen"s daughter travelled from Buckingham Palace along the Mall, she was attacked by a gunman who fired six shots at her vehicle. Several passers-by, her chaf...

New York, 1980 On 8th December 1980, outside the Dakota Building, the 40 year-old Beatle was shot dead by Mark David Chapman, a young stalker who alleged that he was Lennon''s ''d...

Ireland, 1979 The former Viceroy of India and cousin of the Queen, Lord Mountbatten was a World War II naval hero, Allied Commander in South East Asia and one of the architects of...

Russia, 1940 On 20 August 1940, the exiled Bolshevik leader was assassinated with an ice-pick by Ramon Mercader, who was undoubtedly working on behalf of Stalin and his secret pol...

Rome, 1981 On 13 May 1981, in front of a crowd of 20,000 people in St Peter''s Square, a young Turkish gunman shot the Polish Pope, possibly at the behest of the Russians who were...

Gibraltar, 1943 On 4th July, 1943, General Wladyslaw Eugeniusz Sikorski, Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Army, was flying to the Middle East on a Liberator bomber when it crashed...

Buffalo, New York, 1901 On 6th September 1901, whilst opening an expedition, President McKinley was shot by Polish anarchist, Leon Czolgosz. McKinley''s successor, 42 year-old Ted...

On the morning of 10th June 1942, whilst driving his open-top Mercedes to his office, Hitler"s effective deputy and architect of the Final Solution was blown to pieces by a bomb th...

On 4th November 1995, as he was about to address a mass rally of his supporters celebrating the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Accord, one of Israel''s greatest Prime Ministers was gunn...

On August 17 1988, en route for a military base in Northern Pakistan, Pakistan's pro-military strongman was brought down by a bomb in his Hercules transport plane, possibly in reta...

Cape Town, 1966 On 6 September 1966, seven minutes after taking his seat in the House of Assembly, South African Prime Minister Dr Henrick Verwoerd was assassinated by Demetrio Ts...

India, 1984 & 1989 Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, was assassinated on 31st October 1984 by her Sikh bodyguards as she walked in the garden of her New Delhi home. It appea...

Bolivia, 1967 Born to a middle-class Argentine family, Ernesto ''Che'' Guevara became an icon for revolution and rebellious youth all over the world. One of Fidel Castro''s most t...

Cairo, 1981 On 6 October 1981, wearing a black ceremonial uniform at a military parade, the Egyptian President was shot down by four uniformed men who machine-gunned him as he was...

Washington, 1981 On 30th March 1981, as US President Ronald Reagan was leaving the Washington Hilton Hotel, 25-year-old John Hinckley III fired six shots from a .22 revolver. One...

Eire, 1922 One of the most charismatic leaders in the struggle for Irish independence from British rule, Michael Collins came to realise that only compromise could secure southern...

France, 1961: The Day of the Jackal There were three attempts to kill General de Gaulle, all of which were unsuccessful. The first was by German snipers in Paris 1945. The second...

Rastenburg, 1944 Although there had been two previous attempts to kill Hitler, including poisoning a bottle of Cointreau on his aircraft, the assassination attempt which nearly wo...

Los Angeles, 1968 On 6th June 1968, hours after winning the Californian Democratic Primary election, Senator Robert Kennedy was shot and fatally wounded. The assassin was 24-year-...

New Delhi, 1948 India''s greatest founding father was a champion of peaceful protest, yet ironically he was gunned down for no clear reason by Nathuram Godse, a fanatical Hindu, i...

Memphis, 1968 After leading mass protests in Birmingham Alabama and his "I have a dream" speech, Martin Luther King took on the causes of American withdrawal from South Vietnam an...

Yekaterinburg, 1918 After a disastrous war with Germany, the Bolsheviks imprisoned the Romanov family as their supporters approached. Factory worker guards were replaced by Cheka...

Marseille, 1934 On 9th October 1934, just after King Alexander of Yugoslavia had arrived in the cruiser Dubrovnik for a State visit to France, a man later identified as Croatian n...

Sarajevo, 1914 A group of Serbian nationalists were determined to kill the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. Two of the assassins had bombs and one, a student named Gavril Prin...

Dallas, 1963 By 22 November 1963, the date of his assassination, President Kennedy had made many enemies. He had declared war on the Mafia, racial prejudice and the industrial/mil...