How many assassins are there in the world

Instead, it was announced that a military council will take charge of Chad for the next 18 months. In , a different rebel force came close to toppling Mr Deby before French and Chadian army forces drove them out. There have also been three major assassination attempts on a current president, a former president, and a military leader. He was rushed to Germany for hour surgery to remove shrapnel from his lungs, abdomen and liver. Men on motorbikes with concealed number plates drove alongside his military vehicle and sprayed his car with bullets.

If a bullet had managed to strike one of the propeller blades, it could have broken off, throwing the craft into a spin and almost surely killing the president.

Santana had few aspirations in life. In Brazil, the book has also been adapted as a feature film. Cavalcanti said he came across Julio on a reporting trip to the Amazon 10 years ago to investigate modern-day slave labor.

When Santana answered the pay phone in Porto Franco, the small town in the outback Brazilian state of Maranhao where he was living at the time, he was reluctant to speak to the reporter. He spoke about his childhood, his relationship with his parents and his brothers and the quiet life he lived in the forest as well as the internal drama that he faced when he started to work as a hired killer. In the early s, Santana was contracted first as a guide to track down guerrilla encampments.

In one case, he helped capture leftist militant Jose Genoino, a law student and one of the guerrilla leaders. Santana watched in horror as soldiers spent days waterboarding him at a secret location in the rainforest. Julio was barely 18 at the time, and was partly rewarded for his work with a bottle of Coca Cola — his favorite drink and a luxury that his impoverished family could never afford.

Shortly after the Genoino capture, Santana shot and killed another communist militant, a year-old school teacher named Maria Lucia Petit. In , after he killed a married woman suspected of having an affair, Santana was caught by local police and spent a night in jail.

He was released after giving up his new motorbike as a bribe. It was around this time that Santana says he discovered his uncle was cheating him by arranging the hits but only giving Santana a tiny fraction of the amount he was being paid in advance. After he confronted his uncle about exploiting him for more than 20 years, he never spoke to him again, he said.

Santana stopped dealing in death in when he turned 52 and after his wife gave him an ultimatum. While the exotic method of death and the uncertain role played by several other male suspects connected to the North Korean embassy and currently being sought by the Malaysia police seem straight out of a Hollywood script, the profile of the alleged killers as two outgoing twenty-something women is at sharp odds with the popularly understood hitman bio.

And how to explain the giant stuffed bear? A growing body of academic literature on the subject also casts shade on common conceptions of hitmen and their methods. While there is a long and lamentable record of politically-motivated murder-for-hire in places such as Russia, contract killing in developed countries most often involves local thugs and jilted lovers.

A recent effort to understand the market for contract killing by economist Samuel Cameron of the University of Bradford in Britain concluded that it makes little sense from any conventional economic point of view.

In what may be the most comprehensive effort to understand the business of murder-for-hire and its practitioners, a British investigation scoured 39 years of evidence about hired killers.

The authors found hitmen range in age from 15 to 63, with the average being years old. A gun is their weapon of choice. And the most common setting is a suburban streetscape with the target walking a dog or shopping.

It also remains a gender-specific occupation. The authors found only one case of a female assassin-for-hire. The British report proposes four distinct types of contract killers: novices, dilettantes, journeymen and masters. Novices are young, first-time killers often steeped in violent street culture.