World War I and beyond. On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, visited the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. A group of six assassins (Cvjetko Popović, Gavrilo Princip, Muhamed Mehmedbašić, Nedeljko Čabrinović, Trifko Grabež, and Vaso Čubrilović) from the Yugoslavist group Mlada Bosna, supplied with arms by the Serbian Black Hand, gathered on the street where the Archduke's motorcade was to pass, with the intention of assassinating him. The political objective of the assassination was to break off Austria-Hungary's South Slav provinces, which Austria-Hungary had annexated from the Ottoman Empire, so they could be combined into a Yugoslavia. Čabrinović
Otto Merz in an official motorcade in which the Archduke Franz Ferdinand toured Sarajevo, and may have witnessed the assassination of the Archduke by Gavrilo Princip. According to the story told later, Merz reacted quickly to the gunshots. One of the first to reach Franz Ferdinand, he lifted the rather stout Archduke from his seat and carried him to a nearby house. However, that day there were "two" attempts on Franz Ferdinand's life; in the first one, Nedeljko Čabrinović threw a bomb with a 10-second fuse at the archduke's car; the driver accelerated when he saw something thrown at them, and the