Nedeljko Čabrinović

Nedeljko Čabrinović was a Bosnian Serb revolutionary and one of the young conspirators involved in the assassination plot against Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Born in Sarajevo in 1895, he worked in the printing trade and became attracted to radical South Slav nationalism. He joined the network around Young Bosnia, while weapons and assistance for the assassination were supplied through Serbian nationalist and military-conspiratorial channels connected with the Black Hand.

As the archduke’s motorcade passed, Čabrinović threw a bomb at the car, but it bounced away and exploded beneath a following vehicle, injuring several people. He swallowed cyanide and jumped into the Miljacka River, but the poison failed and he was arrested. At trial he expressed political motives and remorse for civilian injuries. Because he was under twenty, Austro-Hungarian law spared him execution; sentenced to twenty years, he died of tuberculosis in prison in 1916.

In Alan Bardos’ The Assassins, Swift’s debts, affair with Lady Elizabeth Smyth and instinct for self-preservation make him an unreliable operative, but his access to the group places him close to Gavrilo Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović and the other men whose plans converge on the Archduke’s visit to Sarajevo with his wife Sophie.