Armenian Acquitted For Killing Talaat -nyt19210604
ARMENIAN ACQUITTED FOR KILLING TALAAT
Defense Introduces Accounts of Grand Vizier's Brutality in Conducting Massacres.
JUNE 4, 1921
BERLIN, June 3 (Associated Press). -- Salomon Teilirian, the Armenian student who in March last shot and killed Talaat Pasha, former Grand Vizier and Minister of Finance of Turkey, was acquitted in the Assize Court here today.
Teilirian n his defense asserted that his mother, who was murdered in 1915 during the massacres in Armenia, had appeared before him in a vision and exhorted him to kill Talaat in revenge for the massacre of 10,000 Armenians. Talaat was killed in Charlottenburg, a suburb of Berlin. The Armenian accosted him in the street and shot him dead, also wounding Talaat's wife.
"Their destination is the void." Professor Lepsius, an Armenian leader, told the court today were Talaat Pasha's instructions when ordering the deportation of Armenians into the Mesopotamian desert. Professor Lepsius, in his testimony for the defense, unfolded a gruesome tale of how tens of thousands of the deportees succumbed to starvation and exhaustion. The Turkish gendarmes, Professor Lepsius asserted, frequently tied ten of twenty Armenians together and threw them into the water.
Another witness testified that he had seen a telegram from Talaat to a high Turkish official, which said: "Wire me how many are dead and how many still are alive." Five messages signed with Talaat's name were introduced in evidence, one of which contained orders to "remove the children from orphanages in order eliminate future danger from antagonistic elements."
A hard copy of this article or hundreds of others from the time of the Armenian Genocide can be found in The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts From The American Press: 1915-1922