those assassination attempts she escaped

Became Queen of England at 25 after the untimely death of her father, Elizabeth II inherits longest reign in UK history. If his state of health has always been at the heart of the palace’s concerns, and his routine is controlled down to the last detail, his longevity is not only due to his flawless medical monitoring. The queen was the target of kidnappers no less than six timesand without her good reflexes or those of her security team, she might not have been with us for a long time. The first assassination attempt on Elizabeth II took place in 1970 during a train journey to Sydney that she was taking during her tour of Australia.

If everything had been checked an hour before his departure, the driver of the machine noticed that a log had been placed on the rails at the last minute. Realizing it early enough to stop, he thus avoided the train from derailing. In 1974, the driver, Albert Rowley, received a medal for “services to the crown”. Unfortunately, this is not the first time that the Queen’s life has been threatened… This assassination attempt was the beginning of a long series.

Elizabeth II, saved in extremis on multiple occasions

In 1981, during the legendary Trooping the Color military parade, a 17-year-old young man, Marcus Sarjeant, shot six blanks on the queen who opened the parade on horseback. Luckily, this experienced rider was able to react in time and avoid the worst. The assailant was sentenced to five years in prison. It seems like his gesture, however, inspired another teenager, who in the same year had planned to kill the Queen while traveling in an open Rolls Royce in New Zealand. The 17-year-old had taken care to set himself up on the fifth floor of a building in the city of Dunedin to shoot the Queen. He has however missed his shot. After a stint in a psychiatric hospital for having then wanted to assassinate Prince Charles, Christopher John Lewis committed suicide at the age of 33.

In 1982, it was no longer in the eyes of the general public but in his own bedroom that another man decided to put an end to the happy days of Elizabeth II. A certain Michael Fagan was arrested with a piece of glass from an ashtray he had broken when he broke into his roomfor according to his words, “to cut one’s veins” in front of the queen. In 2016, a new intruder burst into the palace. After wandering through Elizabeth II’s private garden, he was arrested by her security team. While his intentions towards the queen were never clear, his intrusion revealed that the palace’s alarm system was faulty. Finally, on the morning of December 25, 2021, another man invited himself to the royal family’s party. A crossbow bought on Amazon in hand, he had given himself the mission of avenge the Amritsar massacre. For your information, this is a war crime organized by the British army in 1919, responsible for the death of hundreds of men, women and children in a small Indian village. The man was arrested in time. Once again, Elizabeth had a narrow escape.