Searches continue for missing brother of judo Olympian
More than 100 police officers have been involved in the search for Luis Piovesana, 26, who was last seen at around 3am on Friday at Eastgate retail park having travelled there via a taxi from a venue in Little Ann Street, St Jude's, a 10-minute drive away.
Officers from Avon and Somerset police, and Mr Piovesana's sister – who competed for Team GB before switching to the Austrian team – Lubjana Piovesana, 28, have appealed for people to check their CCTVs, doorbells and dashcams.
Those living in the St Werburgh's, St Agnes, Eastville and Fishponds areas are asked to check the period between 3am until 7am, with a police spokesperson saying it 'could be vital in helping us trace Luis' next steps'.
Mr Piovesana's family, who have spent the weekend searching for their loved one, have also asked for people to check their gardens and sheds in case he has become trapped.
Mounted officers and police drone teams have also been involved in the investigation, with police divers searching the River Frome near the M32.
Detective Inspector Pete Walker said: 'We remain incredibly concerned for the welfare of Luis and despite extensive and extremely thorough searches have unfortunately yet been able to find him.
'We are extremely grateful for the support of Luis' family and friends and also the search and rescue and helicopter teams who have helped us so far and continue to do so.
'More than 100 officers, detectives and police staff are involved in this investigation and everyone is working tirelessly to find Luis.
'We are releasing CCTV clips showing Luis' movements in case it jogs anyone's memory who could have encountered him.'
Speaking to the PA news agency, Ms Piovesana's partner, Laurin Bohler, said they have searched tirelessly for Mr Piovesana since he went missing, with family and friends having come from Birmingham to help search.
'We are looking for places where we could find him alive,' he said.
'What's quite frustrating is we haven't seen him on any CCTV since that night.
'He kind of disappeared, and we have covered the route from Ikea towards his home millions of times.
'Anybody who is in this area please check your backyards, your sheds, places where it's hard for us to get access to.
'After three days (of being missing) he's not lying on a public street, people would have seen him, it was nice weather this weekend, people out and about all the time, he's not in an obvious location.'
He said they were joined by a private search team on Monday, who have been hired using crowdfunding site Just Giving.
Mr Piovesana was last seen wearing black baggy jeans with a diamond patterned stitching on them, cream-coloured trainers, a black and grey Rapha gilet and a black Rapha cap.
Friends saw him getting into a taxi at 2.55am at The Jam Jar in Little Ann Street, St Jude's.
While in the taxi, at 2.59am he made a call to his partner and left a voicemail.
Four minutes later, he called 999 but hung up after 34 seconds, with attempts to call him back having gone unanswered.
At 3.04am, the police received a call from a member of the public concerned for a man walking in the area close to junction 2 of the M32.
Officers attended that call and carried out inquiries, but did not see the man in question.
The last confirmed sighting of Luis is on foot near the Click and Collect facility at the back of the Tesco Extra car park.
His bag, phone and wallet were later found discarded at the retail park by a friend using a tracking app linked to Luis' phone.
Subsequent CCTV inquiries showed Luis discarded those items.
He was reported missing at 7.37am and an investigation was launched.
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Scottish Sun
a day ago
- Scottish Sun
How Monster of Rillington Place evaded justice for evil killing spree…& why secret doc could prove he had MORE victims
PURE EVIL How Monster of Rillington Place evaded justice for evil killing spree…& why secret doc could prove he had MORE victims Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) JOHN Christie is one of Britain's most notorious serial killers - a soft-spoken gentleman on the outside but a perverse and sadistic predator underneath. He targeted women, usually strangling and raping his victims, before burying them in the garden at the infamous 10 Rillington Place, in Notting Hill, London. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 16 Serial killer John Christie murdered at least eight victims, including a baby Credit: Alamy 16 Christie covers his face as he's led to court 16 10 Rillington Place in west London where Christie hid many of the bodies Credit: Getty Christie carried out a decade-long murder spree from 1943, initially while working as a War Reserve Police officer following the Blitz. The monster used his role patrolling the streets of London to hunt out his victims and hid behind his uniform to lure women into a false sense of security. Despite racking up a gruesome kill count of at least eight victims, Christie managed to fly under the radar, in part thanks to a police blunder. It was only after his crime spree was finally exposed that Christie became known as the "Monster of Rillington Place". Now The Sun can reveal that Christie may have admitted to more victims after a bombshell piece of evidence was uncovered. Kate Summerscale - who wrote The Peepshow, a book on Christie - has also told how the killer was able to evade detection for so long. She said: "His first murder, that we know of, was just a case of opportunity. 'He was patrolling the streets of London during black outs, during bombing raids - he had the authority of the uniform." She added: "There was such chaos during the blitz, during the war people went missing, bodies were found, it was an environment in which people who wanted to do things might feel the power to do them." Christie had invited 21-year-old Austrian munitions worker and prostitute Ruth Fuerst back to his flat on August 24, 1943, while his wife Ethel was away. New York's most feared serial killer told me he was hunting women, but wanted to be a 'hero.' After having sex, he impulsively strangled her and stowed her body beneath the floorboards. Christie then had a sinister change of heart and buried Ruth in the back garden the following evening - the first of many victims to be hidden at 10 Rillington Place. The murder sparked a grisly spree across London that left local women terrified of going out alone. Nine years earlier, Christie and his wife Ethel - who would go onto be one of his later murder victims - had moved into the modest home - one of four families crammed into the squalid terraced block. The year after he left the reserve police, Christie took up employment as a clerk at an Acton radio factory, where he met colleague Muriel Amelia Eady - his second victim. On October 7 1944, Christie invited Eady back to his flat, promising he'd concocted a mixture that could cure her bronchitis. He in fact tricked her into inhaling domestic gas - which at the time had a 15% carbon monoxide content - through a tube. While Eady was unconscious he raped and strangled her before burying her next to Fuerst. 16 Police digging up the garden at 10 Rillington Place Credit: Getty Images 16 Crowds gathering outside 10 Rillington Place during the trial Credit: Getty Images 16 Christie stalked the streets of London during World War Two in police uniform Credit: Getty Christie's next two victims have caused some contention for decades. In October 1948, Timothy Evans and his wife Beryl moved into the top floor flat of 10 Rillington Place. Beryl soon gave birth to a baby girl named Geraldine but the joy was short-lived when Evans called police and cryptically informed them that his wife was dead 11 months later. After multiple searches, cops eventually found Beryl, as well as her baby daughter Geraldine and a 16-week male fetus all dead in an outdoor wash-house at the property. A post mortem found both mum and daughter had been strangled, with Beryl also raped and beaten before she was killed. Evans was arrested and initially claimed neighbour Christie had killed his wife during a botched abortion operation. Following questioning, a full confession signed by Evans emerged but it was marred by speculation that the cops had fabricated his admission. Evans withdrew it and again accused Christie, this time of both murders, but was charged. On January 11 1950, Evans was put on trial for the murder of his baby daughter Geraldine, the prosecution opting not to pursue a second charge of murder for Beryl. He was found guilty and then hanged on March 9 at HMP Pentonville. 16 Timothy Evans was convicted and later hanged for the murder of his wife Credit: Getty - Contributor 16 Beryl Evans and her baby Geraldine were murdered by Christie Credit: Getty Images 16 Ruth Fuerst, thought to have been the first victim of Christie Credit: Hulton Archive - Getty In the years since, Christie has been ruled responsible for both murders - and the blunder meant he was free to kill four more women - his wife Ethel on December 14 1952, then Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina MacLennan between January 19 and March 6, 1953. Each of these last three victims were killed with his gas and strangulation technique. He also repeatedly raped them while they were initially unconscious. The bodies were stowed in a small alcove behind the back kitchen wall - which was then covered with wallpaper. Ethel, strangled in bed, was hidden under the floorboards. Christie had been out of work since early December 1952 and following Ethel's death he began selling off furniture, then her wedding ring and clothes, and even forged her signature in order to clear her bank account. On March 20 1953 Christie illegally sublet the flat and hastily moved out - possibly fearing capture was imminent. Four days later the three bodies in the alcove were discovered and a manhunt was launched. He had been staying at Rowton House in Kings Cross until news of the grim discovery was made and then quickly packed up and left, wandering around London until he was arrested on March 31 1953 near Putney Bridge. Christie eventually admitted to all of the murders, except for that of baby Geraldine. He was tried only for the murder of Ethel in June 1953 - and with his plea of insanity failing, was convicted and hanged on July 15, aged 54. Unearthed documents During research for her book, Kate came across a memorandum written by a prison guard who spoke to Christie following his trial and prior to his execution. "I wasn't necessarily going into this to solve the mystery of the Evans case - but it was quite a shock," she told The Sun. He allegedly confessed to both Evans murders for the first time - while further letters allegedly reveal the Home Office opted against releasing the information to the public. Drudging up the case again and admitting to a potential miscarriage of justice would not have been a good look with capital punishment a particularly loaded topic at the time. Referring to the Evans murders, Kate told The Sun: "It was not a very high profile case, it was just seen as a domestic, fish and chip type of crime. "There was not a huge amount of police resources or press interest. It was quite a cursory investigation." Kate said confusingly Evans "told several stories about what happened". 16 Rita Nelson was murdered on January 19 1953 Credit: Getty - Contributor 16 Katheen Maloney was killed by Christie in February 1953 Credit: Getty - Contributor 16 Christie's second known victim Muriel Amelia Eady Credit: Alamy "In one of them he confessed in detail to how he'd killed them and why. That was enough." He had originally accused Christie of being responsible on being arrested - but after police questioning signed a confession which he later retracted and again pointed the finger at his neighbour. "He was a semi-illiterate van driver in his mid-20s and Christie was a middle-aged, apparently respectable man," said Kate. "He'd been injured in the First World War and a police officer in the Second World War. The authorities dismissed Evans' accusations against Christie." She said there was a "certain amount of class prejudice", adding: "Respectable middle aged men or hard-drinking van driver". During her research, Kate was surprised to find the forgotten documents in the archives that may well prove Evans' innocence once and for all. She unearthed the memo written by a prison guard claiming Christie had confessed to him in the cells. Kate said: "He had nothing to lose, he was going to be hanged - Christie made a confession to the murder of Beryl and Geraldine Evans, the only time he did so, and explained how it came about." She went on to say: "I then found letters between a government minister and the head of the Civil Service which shows the prison guard's memo was kept from the public and press in 1953 and remained in sealed files for decades." Kate said the prison guard had toyed with selling the story to the press but in the end reported it to his governor who gave it to the Home Office but the government department "hid it". She said: "It would have been a big scandal, a miscarriage of justice. Capital punishment was already a very hot topic." In 2004, the High Court had acknowledged that Evans did not murder his wife or daughter. But while the court recognised the case as a miscarriage of justice, it did not formally overturn the conviction due to the cost and resources required. Monster cop John Christie lived in a world of female independence similar to today By Ryan Merrifield SERIAL killer John Christie began his decade-long murder spree in 1943 while working as a War Reserve Police officer following the Blitz. The monster used his role patrolling the streets of London to hunt out his victims and hid behind his uniform to lure women into a false sense of security. Author Kate Summerscale told The Sun: "His first murder, that we know of, was just a case of opportunity. 'He was patrolling the streets of London during black outs, during bombing raids - he had the authority of the uniform." Kate continued: 'The freedom and the power of being in that role enabled him to start luring women and killing them, and feeling he could get away with it. 'There was such chaos during the blitz, during the war people went missing, bodies were found, it was an environment in which people who wanted to do things might feel the power to do them.' I said the image of a man in police uniform targeting young lone women reminded me of another more recent murder. Kate agreed. 'When I started researching the case, when I realised he secured his first victim in uniform, it did remind me powerfully of Wayne Couzens,' she said. Then-serving Met officer Couzens abducted, raped and murdered Sarah Everard, 33, in Clapham in March 2022 - having roamed the streets for a random victim, and using his police ID to gain her trust. Kate also thought of the murder of two sisters, Bibaa Henry, 46, and Nicole Smallman, 27, by Danyal Hussein not far from her home in Fryent Country Park, when she began toying with the idea of a new book. 'I started thinking about why men kill women that are strangers to them, without any personal animus and I remembered Christie.' She'd seen his waxwork in Madame Tussauds as a child, and then recalled watching the 'very creepy' 1971 film on late night TV as a teenager. 'That was my starting point,' she continued. 'To learn more about him as a serial killer, and to learn more about the women that he killed, and the world in which he lived, and how that might have contributed to the crimes.' She added: 'I'm quite interested in the incel culture rise, in a type of vengefulness in a certain type of men who feel threatened by the increasing independence of women." She explained that the immediate years after the Second World War's end, when Christie committed the majority of his at least eight murders, saw a 'similarly feverish attitude, a tension about gender roles' as perhaps today. This had come about because women had entered the workforce while the men were away fighting and when they returned home their wives, girlfriends and mothers 'returned to domestic duties' which led to a 'restlessness', she said. 'There was huge pressure on family life,' Kate continued. 'Families were broken up, separations, death, people moving around, a massive increase in divorce rate came after the war. 'It was a period of turbulence, particularly in power relations between the sexes and perhaps we've been in a similar period of turbulence recently.' 16 Ethel Christie was murdered by her husband in December 1952 Credit: Getty - Contributor 16 John Hurt as Timothy Evans, Judy Geeson as Beryl Evans, and Richard Attenborough as John Christie in 1971 film 10 Rillington Place Credit: News Group Newspapers Ltd 16 Christie in his reserve police uniform Credit: Reddit
Daily Mirror
4 days ago
- Daily Mirror
Woman smashed into ground from 4,000ft and survived – then terrifying truth emerged
A woman who miraculously escaped death after her parachute failed discovered that her horrific fall was no accident – and that her husband had tried to kill her twice After seeing a woman jump from an aircraft 4,000 feet up, onlookers could only watch in horror as her body slammed into the ground. In what at first appeared to be a freak accident, both the main and reserve chutes that keen skydiver Victoria Cilliers had been using that day failed to open. Speaking on the documentary SkyDive Murder Plot, Rob Camps, secretary of the parachuting club at Nertheravon Airfield in Witfield, said that it looked almost as if a 'bag of washing' had been thrown out of the plane. He added that it was 'sickening' to watch as Victoria fell for around 25 seconds. He had assumed that her fall would be fatal, and had even grabbed a body-bag before running to the field where she had landed. But what Paul discovered in the days following the horrific incident revealed that Victoria's fall had been no accident – but attempted murder. Victoria was an experienced skydiver, an accredited accelerated freefall (AFF) instructor with 2,654 jumps to her name, but nothing she could do during that terrifying 25-second fall could have prevented that bone-crushing impact. But miraculously, Victoria survived. She had suffered severe spinal and internal injuries, as well as a broken pelvis and five broken ribs, but was well enough to be interviewed by police a few days later. Police took an interest in Victoria's accident after an examination of her parachutes had revealed that the soft links – important components known to insiders as 'slinks' – seemed to be missing from both of parachutes. Without them, jumping out of an aircraft from 4,000 feet would mean almost certain death. Rob Camps had called in the police after he checked her parachute and realised what had happened. Investigators' suspicions quickly fell upon Emile Cilliers, Victoria' husband and the father of her two children. He had been with her the previous day, when a planned parachute jump had been called off due to bad weather, and had inexplicably carried her parachute with him into the loos when one of their children said she needed to use the toilet. Study of the 38-year-old army officer's phone records indicated that he had not only been cheating on his wife with another woman, an Austrian skydiving instructor he'd met on Tinder, but had also amassed significant debts due to his regular use of sex workers. But the problem for detectives investigating the case was that Victoria was unable to accept that the father of her two children could ever want to kill her. She remained under the charismatic South African's spell even after evidence emerged that the sabotage of Victoria's parachute was not Emile's first attempt on her life. Six days before that fateful parachute jump, Victoria had noticed a strong smell of gas in her kitchen. Emile had not been at home, telling his wife he was staying at the army barracks so he could get an early start in the morning. Examination of the gas pipes leading into the house showed irrefutable evidence that Emile had tampered with the valve – and that he had been perfectly willing to kill his children, as well as his wife. A check of his internet search history showed that he had been researching the availability of wet-nurses to feed their newborn baby before his wife's expected death. Still, Victoria found it hard to accept the truth, even after police presented her with the irrefutable evidence of her husband's guilt. She did eventually agree to testify against him, but in a huge twist changed her evidence on the witness stand, raising the possibility that she might somehow have been responsible for the accident. She testified that she had misled police in her initial interviews, and had exaggerated the time that he had been in the ops with her parachute: 'I made it sound worse than it was because I was humiliated. I wanted him to suffer." Emile consistently denied attempting to kill his wife throughout a seven-week trial at Winchester Crown Court and the jury eventually sent a note to the judge stating they would be unable to reach a verdict. With the prospect of a retrial, DI Paul Franklin and DC Maddy Hennah were sent back to the drawing-board. They doggedly assembled more evidence, interviewing Emile's ex-wife, Carly Cilliers, mother to two of his older children. They discovered that he had also rekindled his relationship with her. DI Franklin said that Emile's ability to lie so smoothly to all of the women in his life was the hallmark of a psychopath. He continued: 'He can have a conversation with his wife about picking up the children or a bit of shopping at the same time as arranging to meet someone he knows from Fabswingers for some weekend fun, and ringing someone from Adultwork to see if they are available. 'Three totally separate conversations at the same time, managed in such a way that there was never a wrong phone call to the wrong person. When you see that repeated constantly for years, you see what kind of person he was.' Even after Victoria's near-fatal fall, Emile was texting sex workers from her hospital bedside and arranging to meet them nearby. But Emile's lies began to unravel at his retrial and he was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder, as well as a third charge of recklessly endangering life. He received a minimum 18-year sentence. Meanwhile – at the same parachute club where she so narrowly escaped death – Victoria met former Royal Marine Simon Goodman and the two were married in October 2024.
New Statesman
5 days ago
- New Statesman
The politics of murder
Photo by STR/HISTORICAL ARCHIVES OF SARAJEVO/AFP via Getty Image In Geoffrey Household's superlative thriller Rogue Male, from 1939, an English assassin-adventurer takes a potshot at Adolf Hitler and then flees for his life. An assassin's intended victim is usually a 'Hitler' of some sort. In July 2024, in Pennsylvania, an American youth aimed a rifle at Donald Trump from a rooftop and pulled the trigger. He was dispatched by a team of counter-snipers before he could take better aim and – conceivably – alter the fate of nations. What was his motive? Assassins are often seen as lone wolves with a sense of grievance against a perceived oppressor. Gavrilo Princip, the teenage Bosnian Serb who espoused the anti-Austrian cause, saw a potential tyrant in Archduke Franz Ferdinand after Bosnia was forcibly occupied by imperial Vienna. In 1914, Princip shot dead the heir to the Habsburg throne in Sarajevo. Princip's was, by a long chalk, the most clamorous assassination in modern history: it precipitated the First World War. Through poison gas, starvation, shell fire and machine gun, the 1914-18 conflict killed and wounded more than 35 million people, both military and civilian. Yet, as Simon Ball points out in Death to Order, his impeccably researched history of assassination from 1914 to the present day, Princip did not himself foresee the war's terrible carnage. His aim, rather, was to liberate swathes of the future Yugoslavia from Austro-Habsburg dominance and create a united south Slavic state. With Sarajevo as his starting point, Ball considers the impact of targeted murder on international politics over the past 110 years. The 'catastrophic detonator effect' of Princip's assassination led not only to the collapse of Vienna's double-headed eagle empire but also, Ball reminds us, to a vastly expanded Serb-ruled polity that was only finally dismantled in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. For Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, unsurprisingly, Princip was a nationalist hero who anticipated the Slav unification project under communism; for others (Hitler among them) he was a squalid stalker who shattered the equilibrium of Europe and represented a dangerous new type of assassin who shaped the exercise of power on the world stage. As well as discussing the figure of the lone killer, Ball, a historian from the University of Leeds, introduces us to the techniques of state-sponsored assassination down the decades and to the leaders who have made use of murder, from Joseph Stalin to Augusto Pinochet. One of the most consequential of post-Sarajevo assassinations occurred in Leningrad in 1934 when an unemployed malcontent 'confessed' under torture that he had killed the local party boss Sergei Kirov as part of a vast anti-Stalin plot. This gave Stalin the excuse he needed to scythe down all perceived enemies. The Kremlin whipped itself into a frenzy as alleged conspirators were found guilty and executed. Leon Trotsky, having helped to overthrow the tsarist autocracy in 1917, was now apparently a counter-revolutionary traitor whose time was up. In August 1940, the Spanish Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader struck Trotsky on the head with an ice pick while he was at work in his study in Mexico City. The monster that Trotsky had helped to create – the Soviet Union – had now destroyed him. As Stalin put it: 'No man, no problem.' Ball asks if there such a thing as an 'honourable' assassin. He has some sympathy for the Anglo-Irish peer's daughter Violet Gibson who, in 1926, shot Mussolini in the face at close range in Rome amid a crowd of horrified fascists. The bullet snicked the tip of his nose. Mussolini's (surprisingly charitable) view was that Gibson was 'insane' and therefore could not be detained as a political criminal. She was an embarrassment to the British government, though, as the Duce was feted in most English newspapers and was on good terms with King George V. In 1928, two years after her attempt on the dictator's life, Gibson was transferred to Britain to a mental home in Northampton, where she remained until her death in 1956, unwept for and forgotten. Assassination is a political instrument that can decide a nation's fate abruptly, says Ball. Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who put the bomb in Hitler's briefcase, was unquestionably an honourable failed assassin. Five people died from the blast in Hitler's GHQ in East Prussia on 20 July 1944 – yet the Führer sustained no more than damage to his eardrums and a pair of scorched trousers. It was the 43rd attempt on his life; the botched assassination only fortified his messianic belief in his invulnerability. The July Plot, though unsuccessful, became a foundation myth of Germany's postwar Federal Republic: there were Germans who had opposed Hitler after all. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The 1960s American trinity of the assassinated – John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King , Robert F Kennedy – inevitably lies at the heart of Death to Order. On 4 April 1968, a petty conman named James Earl Ray shot the 39-year-old King with a hunting rifle from the window of a Memphis boarding house and fled the scene in a Ford Mustang. With more than 3,500 FBI agents on his trail, Ray became the subject of the largest and most costly manhunt in US history. For over two months he managed to evade capture until Scotland Yard tracked him down to a hotel in Pimlico, south-west London, from where he had planned to fly to Ian Smith's apartheid Rhodesia. Any American who championed the civil rights cause was made to feel threatened by King's assassination. In his informative pages, Ball chronicles a number of professional hits that took place in London before Sarajevo. Curzon Wyllie, an India Office official, was shot dead in South Kensington in July 1909 by a Punjabi Hindu fundamentalist. Wyllie's was the UK's first ever imperial assassination, and the herald of a spate of extra-legal killings by Hindu terrorist cells who opposed British rule. State-sponsored killers became ever more brazen as a subculture developed between terrorism and what Ball terms 'regime survival'. In 1978, in broad daylight, Iraqi intelligence mortally wounded Saddam Hussein's long-term rival Abdul Razzaq al-Naif as he got into a taxi in front of the Inter-Continental Hotel on Hyde Park Corner. Later that year, in another spectacular London assassination, the Soviets used a poisoned umbrella to eliminate the Bulgarian émigré Georgi Markov as he crossed Waterloo Bridge. The paranoid, spook-ridden world of Frederick Forsyth had come to the British capital. Plastic explosives transformed assassination tradecraft as it could hit a target unerringly, Ball relates. In 1973 the Spanish prime minister Luis Carrero Blanco, an unrepentant Francoist, was killed by Basque separatists in an explosion so intense that it hurled his car up to the roof of a six-storey building. In the cruel humour of the British Foreign Office, Carrero Blanco was 'Spain's first man in space'. Premeditated political murders of this sort were occasionally bungled. One high-profile political assassination from 1973 shocked the inhabitants of the British dependency of Bermuda. In what Ball calls a 'post-imperial tragicomedy', Sir Richard Sharples, Governor of Bermuda, was ambushed during an evening stroll and, along with his dog and aide-de-camp, gunned down by members of a rackety anti-colonial group called the Black Beret Cadre. The assassins were captured and, in 1977, hanged, even though the death penalty had been abolished in Bermuda. Sir Richard's assassins, Erskine Burrows and Larry Tacklyn, were the last people to be executed anywhere in British-controlled territory. Of course, no amount of state security can guard against the appearance of the rogue operator. The Islamists who stabbed to death the British Conservative MP David Amess in his Essex constituency in 2021 and knifed Salman Rushdie 15 times in upstate New York in 2022 were, manifestly, individuals operating on their own. Ball hesitates to call them assassins; they were not Day of the Jackal-style hitmen in the pay of states antithetical to the Western world. Ball has written an exceptionally erudite and detailed history of assassination, packed with research drawn from government archives across the world. He begins and ends with Gavrilo Princip, who died of tuberculosis in a prison in Theresienstadt in 1918. The assassin was too young to be legally executed by the Habsburg state, being only 19 when his shot rang out that June a century ago in Sarajevo. Ian Thomson's books include 'The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica' (Faber & Faber) Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination Simon Ball Yale University Press, 408pp, £25 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: 150 years of the bizarre Hans Christian Andersen] Related This article appears in the 30 Jul 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer of Discontent
