Instead, he was forced to resort to his pistol, but failed to actually aim it. Princip (seen in the photo at the head of this entry being manhandled away just after the shooting) was so hemmed in by the crowd that he was unable to pull out and prime the bomb he was carrying. For the Archduke to be presented, as a stationary target, to the one man in a crowd of thousands still determined to kill him was a remarkable example of sheer bad luck, but, even then, the odds still favoured Franz Ferdinand’s survival.
It was chauffeur Leopold Lojka’s unfamiliarity with the new route that led him to take a wrong turning and, confused, pull to a halt just six feet from Princip himself. It was Franz Ferdinand’s impulsive decision, later in the day, to visit the wounded in hospital – a decision none of his assassins could possibly have predicted – that took him directly past the spot where Gavrilo Princip, the man who actually killed him, had decided pretty much at random to position himself. That bomb injured several members of the Imperial entourage, and these men were taken to hospital. The appalling combination of implausible circumstance that resulted in assassination is one Franz Ferdinand had survived an earlier attempt to kill him on the fateful day, emerging unscathed from the explosion of a bomb that bounced off the folded hood of the his convertible and exploded under a car following behind him in his motorcade. Seen from the Fortean perspective, however, the events of that day in Sarajevo have interesting aspects that often go unremarked. To say that all this is well-known is a bit of an understatement.
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