It was June 28, 1914. On a street corner in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip fired the shot that started World War I when he killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Ferdinand was a top member of the Habsburg royal house. Citizens of Sarajevo came out in thousands, lining the route into the city centre that was to be used for a rare official visit by Ferdinand. However, the crowd was seeded with six would-be assassins united in their loathing of Austria-Hungary.
The details of the assassination were well recorded: how the first attacker lost his nerve as the cortege passed, how the next attacker threw a grenade that struck the limousine but did not harm the Archduke, how the royal party nevertheless continued with the visit, how three would-be assassins melted away into the crowd and how one, a 19-year-old peasant, stood his ground.
That 19-year-old was Gavrilo Princip who was born in a province of Austria-Hungary that had recently been acquired, an area known as Bosnia Herzegovina.
His first name means Gabriel in his mother tongue, Serbian. His mother had wanted to call him Spiro after her late brother, but the local priest intervened saying the boy should be name after the Archangel Gabriel.
He was a student in his last year of high school-- the eighth grade-- when he fired the shot that sparked World War I.
His exact age was a matter of intense legal scrutiny after the assassination because so many people in Austria-Hungary believed a death sentence was appropriate for the assassin who had killed the heir to the Habsburg empire.
However, the Austro-Hungarian legal code was clear on capital punishment. Only those 20 years of age or older on the day of the offense could be executed.
The recorded birth date for Gavrilo Princip was 13 July, 1894, making him 19 years, 11 months and 15 days on the day of the assassination, in other words just two weeks inside the deadline that would have seen him hanged.
It all got a bit complicated when a council record was found by investigators that suggested he had actually been born on 13 June 1894, making him old enough to execute. However, after much legal debate it was accepted that this record was a mistake-- the month of July in the Cyrillic script used by the parish can easily be mistaken for June.
Princip was sentenced to 20 years in prison-- the maximum penalty for someone his age at the time-- but would be dead before the guns of WWI fell silent, dying of tuberculosis in the hospital of his jail on April 28, 1918.
You can read the CNN story in full here
