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The meeting broke up. Singh thrust his way forward, aiming a heavy military revolver at the front-row seats. Singh's targets, like General Dyer's, were good. One of two point-blank shots got Sir Michael in the heart and killed him instantly. Four other bullets, discharged into the group of bigwigs assembled before the speakers' platform, winged Britain's Secretary of State for India, Lawrence John Lumley Dundas, Marquess of Zetland, and two aging British aristocrats. One, Sir Louis Dane, was Sir Michael O'Dwyer's predecessor in the Punjab; the other, Baron Lamington, a onetime Governor of the Bombay Presidency. It was Britain's first major political assassination since 1922, when Irish terrorists shot and killed Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson on the doorstep of his London home for somewhat kindred reasons.
Assassin Singh, captured through the combined efforts of a woman ambulance driver and an R. A. F. officer, smiled as he was charged with murder, remarked placidly: "I didn't mean to kill him. I only wanted to protest."
To non-violent Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose Indian National Congress Party was at that time in momentous session and about to decide whether to renew the campaign of civil disobedience against British rule, this piece of violence was "an act of insanity." But it made a fine story for Lord Haw-Haw, the German broadcaster who so frequently reminds Britons of the shortcomings of their colonial policies.
As for Sir Michael, long ago he gave his opinion of the Mahatma: "The biggest impostor that ever fooled the credulity of a people or frightened a cowardly Government."