Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, occurred on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo when they were mortally wounded by Gavrilo Princip. Princip was one of a group of six assassins (five Serbs and one Bosniak) coordinated by Danilo Ilić, a Bosnian Serb and a member of the Black Hand secret society. The political objective of the assassination was to break off Austria-Hungary's South Slav provinces so they could be combined into a Yugoslavia. The assassins' motives were consistent with the
Fehim Čurčić drowned out the bomb. Gavrilo Princip managed to assassinate Ferdinand and his wife in the second attempt, an event that sparked the First World War that changed the world. Fehim Čurčić Fehim Effendi Čurčić (1866 – 12 February 1916) was a Bosnian politician who served as the 5th Mayor of Sarajevo from 1910 to 1915. On 28 June 1914, Mayor Čurčić welcomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg to Sarajevo and was present later the same day at their assassination, the event that sparked World War I. He died aged 30 in an Austrian