Crime 6: Assassinations Foiled

Assassination attempts are rarely amusing, especially when you consider that someone would have died if everything had gone according to plan. During the trial of South African government official Dr. Wouter Basson in 2000, details of a plot to kill African leaders living in London emerged. A South African assassin picked up the proposed murder weapon, an umbrella rigged to distribute poison through a spike in the tip. The man who gave it to him accidentally tested it out on himself as he demonstrated it. He survived, but it could have been taken as an omen. Once the plan was hatched, they found one of the two targets no longer lived in London and they couldn't keep tabs on the other. "The plot was abandoned and the umbrella thrown into the Thames" [source: The Independent].

2008 HowStuffWorks
An injection of poison from an umbrella tip was one assassin's preferred method.