100 years on, Sarajevo still divided about assassination that sparked firt world war

Today Sarajevo marks 100 years since the assassination that triggered the first world war, but without the leaders of Europe and with its people still torn over the legacy of that fateful day.

Five weeks after a Bosnian Serb nationalist shot dead the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Europe's great powers were sucked through a complex network of alliances into four horrific years of war.

The former foes marked the centenary of the Sarajevo assassination with a low-key ceremony on Thursday during an EU summit in Ypres, Belgium.

But plans for heads of state to come together in the Bosnian capital on June 28 turned out to be wishful thinking, in light of the old Balkan divisions stirred up by the centenary.

Wildly differing interpretations of 20th-century history endure in a region scarred by the conflicts that marked the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

And the figure of the archduke's assassin, the 19-year-old Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip, is particularly divisive.