It was the evening of Monday 29 December, 2003. A car carrying the yellow and white Vatican flag was travelling towards Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, from a small town to the south, where the funeral of a Burundian priest had taken place. Some miles short of the city, a group of men surrounded the car. They shot one of the passengers, wounding him in the head, leg and chest, but left the driver and the other two passengers unharmed.
The wounded passenger died in hospital that night: Archbishop Michael Courtney, Apostolic Nuncio in Burundi. He is thought to have been the first Apostolic Nuncio to have been assassinated in many hundreds of years.
