Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The 19-year-old Bosnian Serb student was one of several conspirators positioned along the couple’s motorcade route.
Earlier that morning, fellow conspirator Nedeljko Čabrinović had thrown a grenade at the motorcade, but it missed the royal couple. After Franz Ferdinand visited the injured victims, the driver accidentally turned onto a wrong street and stopped while reversing. Princip happened to be standing nearby and fired two shots with a Belgian-made FN Model 1910 pistol.
The first bullet struck Franz Ferdinand in the neck and the second hit Sophie in the abdomen. Both died shortly afterward. Princip belonged to Young Bosnia and had links to Serbian nationalist networks, but the assassination was not the sole cause of World War I. It triggered the July Crisis, during which Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and alliance commitments widened the conflict into a general European war.