Vaso Čubrilović Vaso Čubrilović ( 14 January 1897 - 11 June 1990 ) was a Bosnian Serb politician and scholar . In 1914 , he was a student in Sarajevo , when Danilo Ilić recruited him and his friend , Cvjetko Popović , to help assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria . His brother , Veljko Čubrilović , was also involved in the plot . Like Princip , he was a member of Young Bosnia , an underground organisation with the aspiration of the creation of a southern Slav state free from both Ottoman and Hapsburg influence . He lived until the year 1990 , dying at the age of 93 as the last surviving participant in the conspiracy to assassinate the Archduke . Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand . On Sunday , 28 June 1914 , the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie , Duchess of Hohenberg were assassinated in Sarajevo . The fatal shots were fired by a Bosnian Serb , Gavrilo Princip , who wanted Bosnian unification with Serbia and independence from the Austro - Hungarian Empire . Princip and Nedeljko Čabrinović were captured and interrogated by the police . They eventually gave the names of their fellow conspirators . Muhamed Mehmedbašić managed to escape to Serbia . Vaso and Veljko Čubrilović , Danilo Ilić , Cvjetko Popović and Miško Jovanović were arrested and charged with treason and murder . Eight of the men charged with treason and the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand were found guilty . Under Austro - Hungarian law , capital punishment could not be imposed on someone who was under the age of twenty when they had committed the crime . Čabrinović , Princip and Trifko Grabež therefore received the maximum penalty of twenty years in prison . Vaso Čubrilović got sixteen years and Cvjetko Popović thirteen years . Miško Jovanović , Danilo Ilić , who was a member of the Black Hand , and Veljko Čubrilović , who helped the assassins kill the royal couple , were executed on 3 February 1915 . He wrote a letter to his sisters from a Zenica prison explaining how it came about that he was involved in one of the most notorious assassinations in history and of the fall out - " " When I was arrested and detained at Dubica , I admitted giving it [ my bomb ] to Ivo [ Kranjcević ] - Ilić had already betrayed Đukić and Popović . As you can see , we all betrayed each other . [ - ] In my opinion the assassination turned out well , considering who they gave the job to . In any event , it wasn ' t our intention to cause a world war , and we truly believed just a couple of Serbian officers sent us the weapons . " " Later life . Vaso Čubrilović was released when the Allies defeated the Central Powers in November 1918 . He became a teacher in Sarajevo and subsequently a professor at the University of Belgrade . He advocated the expulsion of Kosovar Albanians from Kosovo in a 1937 memorandum . In the closing stages of World War II he wrote another memorandum entitled " The Problem of Minorities in the New Yugoslavia , " concluding that " Democratic Federal Yugoslavia can be sure of peace and development only if it is ethnically pure and has settled once and for all the question of minorities , which are a cause of quarrels between it and the neighbouring states . " After the war he served as Minister of Forests and also as Minister of Agriculture in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia . He received an honorary Ph . D from the University of Banja Luka in 1989 .