assassination

assassination, the murder of a public figure. The term typically refers to the killing of government leaders and other prominent persons for political purposes—such as to seize power, to start a revolution, to draw attention to a cause, to exact revenge, or to undermine a regime or its critics. Such politically motivated murders have taken place in all parts of the world and in every period of history.

Etymology of assassination

The word assassination is derived from Nizārī Ismāʿīliyyah, a religio-political movement that arose in the late 11th century within the Ismāʿīliyyah branch of Shiʿi Islam. The Nizārīs, whose power base was in the Elburz Mountains, in what is today northern Iran, lacked the military strength to confront regional opponents such as the ʿAbbasid caliphate and the Seljuq sultanate directly. Instead, they relied on subterfuge and infiltration to strike at key military and political figures within both empires.

European Crusaders heard and misinterpreted legends about the early Nizārīs and then brought these stories back to their home countries. Two of these misinterpretations—which likely originated with the Nizārīs’ enemies—were that the Nizārīs were fanatics under the sway of the mysterious “old man of the mountain” and that they used hashish to induce visions of paradise before setting out to face martyrdom. The Arabic term ḥashīshī (“consumer of hashish”), which was used as a derogatory term for the Nizārīs, became the root of the English term assassin and its cognates in other European languages. Assassin took on the meaning of a relentless killer.

Targets of assassination

Heads of state or government, such as presidents, prime ministers, and monarchs, have often been the target of assassinations. Four United States presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy—have been assassinated. More than a dozen U.S. presidents have been the targets of unsuccessful assassination attempts, and two—Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan—have been wounded. A would-be assassin targeted President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1933; Roosevelt escaped injury, but a bullet struck and killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who had been riding in Roosevelt’s car.

In 1914 the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, helped bring about World War I a few weeks later. In the 20th century alone the victims of assassination included current and former chief executives of Nicaragua (Anastasio Somoza Debayle, 1980), South Vietnam (Ngo Dinh Diem, 1963), the Dominican Republic (Rafael Trujillo, 1961), South Africa (Hendrik Verwoerd, 1966), Liberia (William R. Tolbert, 1980), India (Indira Gandhi, 1984), Egypt (Anwar Sadat, 1981), Saudi Arabia (Faisal, 1975), Jordan (Abdullah I, 1951), Israel (Yitzhak Rabin, 1995), Iran (Mohammad Ali Rajaʾi and Mohammad Javad Bahonar, 1981), Austria (Engelbert Dollfuss, 1934), Mexico (Venustiano Carranza, 1920), Sweden (Olof Palme, 1986), South Korea (Park Chung Hee, 1979), and many other countries. Victims of assassination have included ministers, legislators, judges, and other government officials, members of the military or police, members of political parties and factions, and religious leaders. Assassins have also killed prominent members of social and political movements, such as American civil rights leaders Medgar Evers (1963) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), American gay rights activist and politician Harvey Milk (who was slain along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone in 1978), Indian independence leader and social activist Mahatma Gandhi (1948), and South African anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko (1977).

While murder was used less frequently as a political tool in the 21st century, there were nevertheless some notable incidents. In 2003 Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjić was killed by a sniper who had ties to organized crime and the regime of Slobodan Milošević. Former prime minister of Lebanon Rafic al-Hariri was killed by a car bomb in 2005; it was widely believed that Syria was responsible for Hariri’s assassination, and, in the unrest that followed, Syrian troops were forced to end their nearly three-decade occupation of Lebanon. Former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto was killed in a suicide bombing (2007) carried out by the Pakistani Taliban, and Haitian Pres. Jovenel Moïse was gunned down in his home (2021) by Colombian mercenaries. In July 2022 former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe was shot and killed at a campaign event for a fellow Liberal-Democratic Party politician.

Opponents of Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin were frequently victims of assassination. In 2006 investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed in her Moscow apartment building. Politkovskaya was one of more than two dozen journalists who would be murdered during Putin’s time in office. Nearly a quarter of those killed were from the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta; in 2021 Dmitry Muratov, that publication’s editor in chief, received the Nobel Peace Prize for “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression.” Opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was fatally shot within sight of the Kremlin (2015), and anticorruption activist Aleksey Navalny was poisoned (2020) with novichok, a nerve agent that was developed by the Soviets. Navalny became critically ill, and he spent a month recovering in a German hospital only to be imprisoned immediately upon his return to Russia. Along with journalists and opposition leaders, Russian intelligence officers who had defected to the West were also targeted. Former Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned with polonium-210 (2006) while drinking tea in a London hotel, and former GRU (Russian military intelligence) agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned (2018), along with his daughter, in a novichok attack in Salisbury, England. Although the Skripals eventually recovered, a British woman who came into contact with the container that was used to transport the novichok sickened and died.

Motives for assassination

The motives for assassination are various (and often complex and multiple). In some cases, assassins wish to force a change in leadership or the form of government. Such assassinations often occur during military coups, as was the case in the overthrow of Pres. Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam (1963) and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso (1987). Assassins may lust for power, or their focus may be on changing the government in a way that they believe is for the good of society (or both). At times, ancient Greeks and Romans practiced tyrannicide, the killing of a tyrant or dictator for the public good. Some of the men who killed Julius Caesar in 44 bce, for example, considered the slaying to be an act of patriotism to save the Roman republic from a would-be king.

Another type of assassination, often called “propaganda by the deed,” is designed to gain publicity for a worldview. Some 19th-century anarchists were prominent advocates of such symbolic murders, with which they hoped to demonstrate the vulnerability of governments and to inspire rebellion. Anarchists killed several rulers in Europe in the late 19th century (including in Italy, Spain, and France) as well as Pres. William McKinley of the United States in 1901. A number of terrorist and paramilitary organizations have used assassination (as well as the murder of ordinary citizens) for propaganda purposes. In the 20th century such organizations included the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland, the Basque separatist group ETA in Spain, and guerrilla groups and paramilitary units in many parts of the world.

Governments themselves have also used assassination as a weapon against rivals, dissidents, and various other perceived threats, among their own citizens and those of other countries. One prominent example of this practice was Operation Wrath of God, an Israeli assassination campaign that sought to avenge the kidnapping and murder of 11 Israeli athletes by Palestinian militants in September 1972 at the Munich Olympics. In some cases, an assassin seeks retaliation for real or imagined wrongs. The murder of U.S. Pres. James A. Garfield in 1881 is considered a typical example of a vengeance assassination. Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau, a thwarted office seeker who was convinced that he had been wrongly denied the political rewards that were due him. The assassination of U.S. Pres. Abraham Lincoln in 1865 is another example of a vengeance killing. The assassin, a fanatic proslavery advocate named John Wilkes Booth, sought to avenge the Confederacy’s defeat in the American Civil War.

The motives for assassination are not always clear. Uncertainty has surrounded the circumstances of the murder of U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy in 1963, for example. The official finding of the Warren Commission was that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, killed Kennedy because of some undisclosed personal motive. However, numerous conspiracy theories allege that Oswald was part of some plot that has yet to be uncovered. Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of the Kennedy assassination has been cited as proof of both the lone gunman and conspiracy theories.