were heralded far and wide for their good effect.
A fusillade of shots fired by a young Zagreb businessman, member of a secret political society, killed the two men as they sat in an automobile in Marseilles shortly after the monarch had debarked from a Yugoslav warship.
JUMPED ON RUNNING BOARD
As Alexander seated himself beside M. Barthou in an official automobile, the assassin jumped on the running board and fired. The monarch was wounded mortally with the first few shots. M. Barthou tried to shield his royal companion and himself went down under the hail of bullets from the assassin’s revolver.
The assassin was Kalem Petrus, a youth of Croatian origin, and a member of a secret political society pledged to slay the King. It had at first been reported that Communists were responsible for the assassination.
Petrus was almost immediately slain by the sabers of the police guarding the royal visitor.
EXCITEMENT PREVAILING
The assassin’s bullets claimed a third victim, General Alphonse Joseph Georges of the French Superior War Council, a member of the escorting party. Admiral Berthelot, the French Maritime Prefect at Toulon, was critically wounded.
The assassination has plunged the capitals of all Europe into a state of frenzied excitement comparable only to that prevailing twenty years ago following the slaying in Sarajevo of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria, an event that proved to be the spark needed to set off a world war.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
