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who had been imposed by a foreign power. Famous paintings depict the murder of rulers such as David's “The murdered Marat”(Figure 1).


Figure 1 Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825): The murdered Marat (copied from Visipix)

For many people all over the world, President John F. Kennedy's assassination 1963-11-22 (Figure 2) was a huge shock and an unforgettable event that entered the world's collective memory (Zelizer 1992).


Figure 2 The assassination of President John F. Kennedy (photographed by Zapruder, and copied from Visipix)

The real world is full of murders committed for political reasons'.

Politicians are killed under many different circumstances, for example by political enemies seeking revenge, such as the first president of the Republic of Kongo, Patrice Lumumba, arranged by his contender Mobutu in 1961, or in 2006 the former Sunnite dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hossein, by the Shiite-Kurdish government.

There are also so-called “targeted killings” arranged by other nations (see e.g. Zussman and Zussmann 2006, Statman 2004).

The number of political assassinations remains large even if it is

1) A list of assassination of heads of state from 1946 to 2000 is given in the Appendix of Iqbal and Zorn (2006). Statistics from 1875 to 2004 are provided in Jones and Olken (2006). Recent encyclopedic treatises are Lentz (2002) and Sifakis (2001).