ASSASSINS

How long do you remain conscious for after having your head chopped off? For centuries, people thought that a severed head might be aware of what's going on for up to 30 seconds after decapitation — or even longer! That folklore has its origins in the assassination of revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat by Charlotte Corday, the French Revolution's "Angel of Assassination". You might know that in...

How do you assassinate someone when you don't know what they look like? The K-Pop Demon Hunter of her time, Korea's first empress, Queen Min, was a total bad ass. But there weren't any reliable images of her, so no one beyond her immediate court knew what she looked like. Which turned out to be a problem when samurai assassins, part of a rabble-rousing mob, stormed her palace early one morning wit...

Almost two decades after her assassination we still don't know who killed Benazir Bhutto. But that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of theories about who had the means and the motive. As the first woman to become prime minister of a Muslim country, Bhutto went toe-to-toe with the totalitarian forces that killed her father and controlled her country. To her supporters, she represented their great ho...

There have been few assassinations as notorious or consequential as Abraham Lincoln's. But for years before he killed the President, Lincoln’s assassin was a household name across North America. In fact, stage actor John Wilkes Booth was so famous that many people had images of him hung on the walls of their homes. So how does an American celebrity kill an American President in front of hundreds o...

Aslan Pahari brings you stories of the world's most shocking assassinations. From seizing power, to silencing dissidents, ASSASSINS unpacks the moments in which someone decides that murder is the move. Every episode will be available as audio and video, just search for ASSASSINS with Aslan Pahari on the ABC listen app, ABC iview or wherever you get your podcasts. There you'll find more stories of...