A descendant of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in Sarajevo triggered the first world war, has said that his family should not be blamed for causing the war that led to 37 million people killed or wounded.

In an interview with a European group of newspapers including the Guardian, Karl Habsburg-Lothringen, the grandson of the last emperor of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Charles I, said: "If you were to simplify it, you could say that the shooting in Sarajevo started the first world war. But if there hadn't been the shooting in Sarajevo, it would have kicked off three weeks later somewhere else."

The fatal shooting of the Austrian archduke on 28 June 1914, by the 19-year-old Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip, is widely held to have triggered a chain reaction that dragged Russia, Germany and eventually France and Britain into war....