Assassination is the willful killing, by a sudden or secret attack, of a personespecially a prominent or important one—typically for political, social, or ideological reasons. Assassinations may be ordered by individuals or organizations, and carried out by themselves or their hired accomplices. Acts of assassination have been performed since ancient times. A person who carries out an assassination is called an assassin.
Etymology
Assassin comes from medieval Italian and French or , believed to derive from the word hashshashin (),American Speech – McCarthy, Kevin M. Volume 48, pp. 77–83 and shares its etymological roots with hashish ( or ; from ).The Assassins: a radical sect in Islam – Bernard Lewis, pp. 11–12 It referred to a group of Nizari Ismailis known as the Order of Assassins who worked against various political targets.
Founded by Hassan-i Sabbah, the Assassins were active in the Near East from the 11th to the 13th centuries. The group killed members of the Abbasid, Seljuk, Fatimid, and Christian Crusader elite for political and religious reasons.Secret Societies Handbook, Michael Bradley, Altair Cassell Illustrated, 2005.
Although it is commonly believed that members of the Order of Assassins were under the influence of hashish during their killings or during their indoctrination, there is debate as to whether these claims have merit, with many Eastern writers and an increasing number of Western academics coming to believe that drug-taking was not the key feature behind the name.
The term "assassinare" (to assassinate) was used in Medieval Latin from the mid 13th century.
The earliest known use of the verb "to assassinate" in printed English was by Matthew Sutcliffe in A Briefe Replie to a Certaine Odious and Slanderous Libel, Lately Published by a Seditious Jesuite, a pamphlet printed in 1600, five years before it was used in Macbeth by William Shakespeare (1605).A briefe replie to a certaine odious and slanderous libel, lately published by a seditious Iesuite. Imprinted at London: By Arn. Hatfield, 1600 (STC 23453) p. 103"assassinate, v." OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2016. Web. August 11, 2016.
Use in history
Ancient to medieval times Assassination is one of the oldest tools of power politics. It dates back at least as far as recorded history.
The Egyptian pharaoh Teti, of the Old Kingdom Sixth Dynasty (23rd century BC), is thought to be the earliest known victim of assassination, though written records are scant and thus evidence is circumstantial. Two further ancient Egyptian monarchs are more explicitly recorded to have been assassinated; Amenemhat I of the Middle Kingdom Twelfth Dynasty (20th century BC) is recorded to have been assassinated in his bed by his palace guards for reasons unknown (as related in the Instructions of Amenemhat); meanwhile contemporary judicial records relate the assassination of New Kingdom Twentieth Dynasty monarch Ramesses III in 1155 BC as part of a failed coup attempt. Between 550 BC and 330 BC, seven Persian kings of the Achaemenid Dynasty were murdered. The Art of War, a 5th-century BC Chinese military treatise, mentions tactics of assassination and its merits.
In the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), King Joash of Judah was assassinated by his own servants;2 Kings 12:19–21 Joab assassinated Absalom, King David's son;2 Samuel 3:26–28 RSV King Sennacherib of Assyria was assassinated by his own sons;2 Chronicles 32:21 and Jael assassinated Sisera.Judges 4 and 5
Chanakya (–283 BC) wrote about assassinations in detail in his political treatise Arthashastra. His student Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Maurya Empire, later made use of assassinations against some of his enemies.
Some famous assassination victims are Philip II of Macedon (336 BC), the father of Alexander the Great, and Roman dictator Julius Caesar (44 BC). A number of Roman emperors were assassinated, as did many of the Muslim Shia Imams hundreds of years later. Three successive Rashidun caliphs (Umar, Uthman Ibn Affan, and Ali ibn Abi Talib) were assassinated in early civil conflicts between Muslims. The practice was also well known in ancient China, as in Jing Ke's failed assassination of Qin king Ying Zheng in 227 BC. Whilst many assassinations were performed by individuals or small groups, there were also specialized units who used a collective group of people to perform more than one assassination. The earliest were the sicarii in 6 AD, who predated the Middle Eastern Assassins and Japanese shinobis by centuries.Pichtel, John, Terrorism and WMDs: Awareness and Response, CRC Press (April 25, 2011) pp. 3–4. Ross, Jeffrey Ian, Religion and Violence: An Encyclopedia of Faith and Conflict from Antiquity to the Present, Routledge (January 15, 2011), Chapter: Sicarii. 978-0765620484
During the Renaissance, tyrannicide became very common in Western Europe.
Modern history
During the 16th and 17th centuries, international lawyers began to voice condemnation of assassinations of leaders. Balthazar Ayala has been described as "the first prominent jurist to condemn the use of assassination in foreign policy". Alberico Gentili condemned assassinations in a 1598 publication where he appealed to the self-interest of leaders: (i) assassinations had adverse short-term consequences by arousing the ire of the assassinated leader's successor, and (ii) assassinations had the adverse long-term consequences of causing disorder and chaos. Hugo Grotius's works on the law of war strictly forbade assassinations, arguing that killing was only permissible on the battlefield. In the modern world, the killing of important people began to become more than a tool in power struggles between rulers themselves and was also used for political symbolism, such as in the propaganda of the deed.M. Gillen (1972). Assassination of the Prime Minister: the shocking death of Spencer Perceval. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. .
In Japan, a group of assassins called the Four Hitokiri of the Bakumatsu killed a number of people, including Ii Naosuke who was the head of administration for the Tokugawa shogunate, during the Boshin War.Turnbull, Stephen. The Samurai Swordsman: Master of War. Tuttle Publishing; 1st edition (August 5, 2014). p. 182. Most of the assassinations in Japan were committed with bladed weaponry, a trait that was carried on into modern history. A video-record exists of the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma, using a sword.
In 1895, a group of Japanese Rōnin assassins killed the Korean queen (and posthumously empress) Myeongseong.
In the United States, from 1865 to 1963, four presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy—died at the hands of assassins. There have been at least 20 known attempts on U.S. presidents' lives.
In Austria, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg was carried out in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist. He is blamed for igniting World War I. Reinhard Heydrich died after an attack by British-trained Czechoslovak soldiers on behalf of the Czechoslovak government in exile in Operation Anthropoid, and knowledge from decoded transmissions allowed the United States to carry out a targeted attack, killing Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto while he was travelling by plane.
During the 1930s and 1940s, Joseph Stalin's NKVD carried out numerous assassinations outside of the Soviet Union, such as the killings of Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists leader Yevhen Konovalets, Ignace Poretsky, Fourth International secretary Rudolf Klement, Leon Trotsky, and the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) leadership in Catalonia.Michael Ellman. "The Role of Leadership Perceptions and of Intent in the Soviet Famine of 1931–1934"'). . Europe-Asia Studies, 2005. p. 826 India's "Father of the Nation", Mahatma Gandhi, was shot to death on January 30, 1948, by Nathuram Godse.
The African-American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum) in Memphis, Tennessee. Three years prior, another African-American civil rights activist, Malcolm X, was assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965.
Cold War to present
Most major powers repudiated Cold War assassination tactics, but many allege that was merely a smokescreen for political benefit and that covert and illegal training of assassins continues today, with Russia, Israel, the U.S., Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, and other nations accused of engaging in such operations.John Dingles (2004). The Condor Years. . After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the new Islamic government of Iran began an international campaign of assassination that lasted into the 1990s. At least 162 killings in 19 countries have been linked to the senior leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The campaign came to an end after the Mykonos restaurant assassinations because a German court publicly implicated senior members of the government and issued arrest warrants for Ali Fallahian, the head of Iranian intelligence. Evidence indicates that Fallahian's personal involvement and individual responsibility for the murders were far more pervasive than his current indictment record represents.
In India, Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi (neither of whom was related to Mahatma Gandhi, who had himself been assassinated in 1948), were assassinated in 1984 and 1991 in what were linked to separatist movements in Punjab and northern Sri Lanka, respectively.
On October 19, 1984, 37-year-old Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, a Roman Catholic priest in Warsaw, was assassinated by three Security Service agents in Włocławek, Poland.
In 1994, the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira during the Rwandan Civil War sparked the Rwandan genocide.
In Israel, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated on November 4, 1995, by Yigal Amir, who opposed the Oslo Accords.
On September 2, 2022, a 35 year old Brazilian national attempted to assassinate the then vice-president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. However, the attempt was unsuccessful because the assassin's gun jammed.
On September 10, 2025, American right-wing political activist and media personality Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at a Turning Point USA rally at Utah Valley University.
United States government killing of citizens In 2012, The New York Times revealed that the Obama administration maintained a "kill list" containing terrorism suspects. The list is sometimes referred to as a "disposition matrix", and President Obama made a final decision on whether anyone listed would be killed, without court oversight and without trial. In September 2011, American citizens Anwar Al-Awlaki and Samir Khan were assassinated in Yemen by the United States government via drone strikes. Two weeks later, Awlaki's 16-year-old son, also an American citizen, was killed in a strike targeting Ibrahim al-Banna, a senior operative in Al-Qaeda. Al-Banna was not killed in the strike.
Further motivations As a military and foreign policy doctrine
Assassination for military purposes has long been espoused: Sun Tzu, writing around 500 BC, argued in favor of using assassination in his book The Art of War. Over 2000 years later, in his book The Prince, Machiavelli also advises rulers to assassinate enemies whenever possible to prevent them from posing a threat.Machiavelli, Niccolò (1985), The Prince, University of Chicago Press. Translated by Harvey Mansfield