ASSASSIN'S REMORSE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 162, 11 July 1934, Page 7

ASSASSIN'S REMORSE.

SIGNAL FOR THE GREAT WAR BELGRADE, July 4. "I did not realise that our act would sweep Europe into the horrors of war, or I would have abstained!" Such was tho despairing cry of Bora Jeftic, one of the plotters of the murder of Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo (Bosnia) on June 28, 1014, when interviewed on the twentieth anniversary of the tragedy. Apart from Prinscp, the youth who fired the fatal shots, four of the assassins survived the World War. Three of them refused to discuss the murder, but Bora Jeftie said that had the plotters been able to see what the war entailed they would have stayed their hands. He freely admitted that the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince and his wife had been futile, because it was certain that the cause of unity of the Southern Slavs would have triumphed sooner or later. Nevertheless, the real reason for the war was not the assassination of the Grand Duke, but Austria's determination to wage war on Serbia at the first provocation. Tho immediate objective of the Sarajevo plot was to free the Bosnian farmers, whose lives before the war were littlo better than those of slaves.