Political Crime - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1307: Friday the 13th: King Philip the Fair Orders the Arrest of the Knights Templar

Before dawn on Friday 13 October 1307, royal officers across France moved on hundreds of Knights Templar at once, arresting the warrior monks in their own preceptories under sealed orders opened simultaneously nationwide. King Philip the Fair, deeply in debt to the order he had once sworn to protect, accused its knights of heresy and secret blasphemous rites.

Under torture, many confessed to charges historians now regard as fabricated to justify seizing the order's vast wealth. The arrests marked the beginning of the end for the Templars, who were suppressed within a few years and their leaders burned at the stake, and contributed to the enduring misfortune of the date of Friday the 13th.

Medieval illustration of the Grand Master of the Templars burning at the stake.

⬅ See all events from 13 October

Arrest Europe Execution France Political Crime Religious Persecution Torture

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1960: Live on Air: the Televised Assassination of a Japanese Political Leader

Inejiro Asanuma, leader of the Japan Socialist Party, was mid speech at a political debate in Tokyo on 12 October 1960 when a seventeen year old ultranationalist named Otoya Yamaguchi sprinted across the stage and drove a short samurai sword into his chest, twice. Cameras were rolling for a live broadcast, and the killing was captured in full, shown and reshown to a horrified nation.

Yamaguchi was no stranger to the far right; he had trained with militant nationalist groups and viewed Asanuma, who had made friendly overtures toward Communist China, as a traitor to Japan. Arrested at the scene, he spent weeks in juvenile detention before hanging himself in his cell with a bedsheet, leaving behind a message of loyalty to the emperor.

His death meant he was never tried, and the killing remains one of the most notorious political murders of postwar Japan, preserved on film as it happened.

Inejiro Asanuma founds a new political party in 1945

⬅ See all events from 12 October

Asia Assassination Japan Murder Political Crime

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1984: The Brighton Bomb: the IRA Attempt to Wipe Out Margaret Thatcher and Her Cabinet

The Grand Hotel in Brighton was packed with Britain's Conservative leadership for their annual conference when a long-delay bomb, planted by the Provisional IRA weeks earlier in a guest room, tore through the building in the early hours. Margaret Thatcher was still awake working on her conference speech in the room next door and escaped with only cuts, but five people died in the rubble and 31 more were injured, some permanently maimed.

The bomber, Patrick Magee, had checked into the hotel under a false name and set the timer so far in advance that he was long gone before it detonated. The IRA's chilling statement afterward noted that Thatcher had been lucky that day, but they would only need to be lucky once. Magee was later caught through forensic evidence left on the bomb casing and convicted for the attack.

Grand Hotel, Brighton, after the bombing, 1984. Photo: D4444n / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).

⬅ See all events from 12 October

Assassination Bombing Brighton Europe Political Crime Terrorism UK

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

1789: The Doctor Who Wanted Death to Be Humane: Joseph Guillotin Proposes a Single-Blow Beheading Machine

In Versailles in 1789, a physician named Joseph Guillotin stood before France's new National Assembly and argued that execution should not be a matter of rank or suffering. He proposed that every condemned prisoner, noble or commoner, die the same way: instantly, by a single blow of a blade, rather than by the axe, the sword, or the rope, methods that often took multiple strokes or slow strangulation to finish the job.

Guillotin framed it as a mercy, a way to strip cruelty and class privilege out of state killing. He did not invent the device that would later carry his name, nor did he ever operate one, but the machine built from his proposal would go on to define the French Revolution's Reign of Terror, and the word guillotine would forever be linked to the man who only meant to make dying less brutal.

⬅ See all events from 10 October

Europe Execution France Political Crime Trial

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Subscribe to Dark Stories