GAVRILO PRINCIP – ASSASSIN AND PATRIOT

BIJELJINA, JULY 24 /SRNA/ - Gavrilo Princip, a member of Young Bosnia and the assassin of Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand, was born on July 25, 1894.

As a minor, Princip was sentenced to 20 years in a harsh prison, and due to inhumane prison conditions and daily torture, he contracted tuberculosis. Members of Young Bosnia planned the assassination of Ferdinand for June 28, 1914, Vidovdan. After Muhamed Mehmedbašić failed to carry out the attack and following Nedeljko Čabrinović's unsuccessful attempt, Princip carried out the assassination. Princip said during the trial that Ferdinand's wife, Sophie, had been killed by a twist of fate and that she had not been the target of the assassination. According to eyewitness accounts from contemporaries and court records, Princip maintained a heroic demeanour before the police and the court. He served his sentence in solitary confinement, where he slowly died from starvation and illness, while being systematically and daily beaten. As some guards and prisoners testified after the end of the war, Princip was given food only every fifth day. He was brutally tortured in various ways. His torturers would place him in a wooden barrel into which numerous large nails had been driven, and then roll it around, causing the nails to pierce Gavrilo's body. Princip was buried secretly on the night between April 28 and 29, 1918. Until the end of the war, no one knew the location of his grave. However, after the war, an Austro-Hungarian soldier, the Czech František Lebl, discovered the burial site of Princip. He had been ordered to bury Gavrilo in the local Catholic cemetery, with instructions not to reveal the location of the grave. Nevertheless, that same night, Lebl made a sketch of the cemetery and Princip's grave and sent it to his father to keep in case he was sent to the front and killed. Princip's remains, along with those of Čabrinović, Trifko Grabež and other conspirators who died in Theresienstadt, were transferred to Sarajevo and buried there in a shared tomb. For a long time after the First World War, Sarajevo was known around the world for the assassination carried out near the Latin Bridge. The bridge bore Gavrilo Princip's name for decades, until Bosniak authorities renamed it the Latin Bridge again during the conflict in the 1990s. This was done as part of a campaign to rename all Sarajevo streets named after prominent Serbs.