Former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe dies: Political assassinations that shook the world

Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe died after he was shot at on Friday while campaigning for the upcoming election. He showed “no vital signs” after being rushed to a hospital following the attack at an event in the country’s Nara region, Japanese media reported.

A 41-year-old male suspect has been arrested for attacking the leader.

As the story unfolds, we take a look at political assassinations that sent shockwaves across the world.

Abraham Lincoln, 1865

Five days after the civil war ended, then US President Abraham Lincoln was shot in the head at a theatre in Washington DC on 14 April 1865. He died the next morning.

It was shortly after 10 pm when actor John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre and fired at the president. A Confederate sympathiser, he was outraged by the abolition of slavery in the United States.

The assassination was part of an attempt to revive the Confederate.

Booth fled on a horseback and was tracked down later at a farm in rural northern Virginia. Authorities set the barn where he was taking shelter ablaze and Union Army soldier Boston Corbett shot him in the neck. Booth was paralysed and died a few hours later.

Mahatma Gandhi, 1948

Six months after Independence, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated by Hindu extremist Nathuram Godse on 30 January 1948.

The leader was walking to a prayer meeting in Birla House, New Delhi when Godse shot Gandhi dead at point-blank range. He was shot three times in the chest and head.

The 38-year-old was a member of Hindu Mahasabha, which had accused Gandhi of having betrayed Hindus, being pro-Muslim and soft on Pakistan. A trial court sentenced him to death a year after the assassination. He was executed in November 1949.

John F Kennedy, 1963

On 22 November 1963, US President John F Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Crowds of people had lined the streets to wave at the charismatic leader and his wife Jacqueline Kennedy when suddenly gunfire was heard.

Bullets struck the president’s neck and head and he slumped over toward his wife. Then-Governor John Connally, who was travelling with them, was shot in his back; he recovered.

The car rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital but the president was pronounced dead.

Kennedy was shot at by Lee Harvey Oswald, a former US Marine, from the sixth floor of a school as the president’s motorcade passed. After the assassination, he killed Dallas police officer JD Tippit.

The killer was charged with the assassination but denied responsibility for the killing. Two days on, Oswald was shot by a local nightclub owner Jack Ruby on live television in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters. He died at the Parkland Hospital.

Malcolm X, 1965

African-American leader Malcolm X was gunned down on 21 February 1965 during a speech at Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Three gunmen rushed on stage and opened fire at the 39-year-old civil rights leader in front of his pregnant wife and three daughters.

Three members of the Nation of Islam – Talmadge Hayer or Thomas Hagan, (aka Mujahid Abdul Halim), Norman Butler (aka Muhammad Abdul Aziz) and Thomas Johnson (aka Khalil Islam) — were convicted of his murder in 1966 and sentenced to life prison. The NOI is an African-American religious and political organisation formed in 1930 to improve the economic and spiritual conditions of the African American community in the United States, according to a report in TIME.

Malcolm X joined the group in 1952 and left in 1964 when he converted to Sunni Islam.

Halim had confessed to the murder during the trial but had maintained that the other two men were innocent. In November 2021, Aziz, who was 83 then, and the late Islam were exonerated.

Martin Luther King Junior, 1968

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr was shot dead on 4 April 1968 while standing on a balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

James Earl Ray, a 40-year-old escaped fugitive, later confessed to the crime and was sentenced to a 99-year prison term. Three days after pleading guilty, he retracted his confession and maintained his innocence for the next 28 years.

News of King’s assassination led to racial violence, resulting in more than 40 deaths nationwide and extensive property damage in over 100 American cities.

Indira Gandhi, 1984

Indira Gandhi, the then prime minister of India, was shot by two of her Sikh bodyguards Sawant Singh and Beant Singh on the morning of 31 October 1984 at her residence in Safdarjung Road, New Delhi. She was shot a total of 33 times.

The assassination was in response to Operation Bluestar when Gandhi sent the Army inside Golden Temple to flush out Khalistani terrorists.

Beant Singh was killed by the police shortly after the assassination. Sawant Singh and alleged conspirator Kehar Singh were sentenced to death on 6 January 1989.

Gandhi’s death lead to the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, where mobs killed thousands of people from the community as policemen and Congress leaders watched on. According to an official estimate, around 2,700 Sikhs lost their lives in the pogrom.

Former union minister HKL Bhagat, Congress leaders Jagdish Tytler, Congress lawmakers Sajjan Kumar, Lalit Makan, and Dharam Das Shastri, were some of the key accused in riots cases, who allegedly instigated mobs. Kumar was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Rajiv Gandhi, 1991

Indira Gandhi’s son and former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was killed by a suicide bomber while campaigning in an election in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur on 21 May 1991.

“Relax don’t worry,” Gandhi told a police officer, who tried to stop a woman from approaching him at a rally. Later identified as Dhanu, a Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTW) suicide bomber, she bent to touch his feet and pulled a trigger on an RDX-laden belt she was wearing under her clothes. Gandhi was killed along with 14 others.

Gandhi, the youngest Indian prime minister at the age of 40, had made an enemy of the LTTE, a militant group in Sri Lanka after he sent the Army to help the island nation fight them. He was not in power when killed.

Benazir Bhutto, 2007

Benazir Bhutto, the first woman to lead Pakistan, was murdered on 27 December 2007 by a 15-year-old suicide bomber called Bilal.

She had finished an election rally in Rawalpindi when he approached her convoy, shot at her and blew himself up. Bilal had been asked to carry out the attack by the Pakistani Taliban, reports BBC.

At the time of her death, Bhutto was making a bid for a third term as prime minister.

With inputs from agencies

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