A TURKISH EXECUTION.

Grey River Argus, Volume VIII, Issue 526, 1 June 1869, Page 3

A TURKISH EXECUTION.

The Levant Herald of February 4 says : — "Another of those locally rare sacrifices to justice took place on Wednesday morning in a street near Ak-Serai. The victim in this case was a Mussulman Albanian named Hassan, who about a fortnight ago violated and then murdered a woman at Scutari. He had entered the house in a lonely quarter of the Asiatic suburb in the day-time, and, finding the woman alone, perpetrated his double crime, and afterwards decamped with what light valuables could carry off. The police, for a wonder, succeeded in tracking him ; and as he was identified by some one who had seen him enter the house, he finally confessed the crime during the second or third examination at the Zaptich. From the first there was no chance of his escaping capital punishment, but his sentence was, as usual, concealed from him till the last. The execution had been delayed for some days owing to the difficulty of finding a gipsy — the usual finisher of the law in Stamboul— to undertake the job for the modest fee offered by the authorities. The Zingarees, however, holding out for the better pay, a policeman was at length induced to do the ghastly work, and without previons hint of his fate, the murderer was roused from his sleep at sunrise on Wednesday, to go down, as he was told, to a steamer for exile to Trebizond. On reaching the spot selected, the party of police escorted him halted, and the first intimation the wretch had of his fate was the question if he desired to say his prayers. He replied in the negative, and the executioner then advanced and attempted to throw a looped cord over his head. Manacled though he was, he resisted for some minutes, struggling fiercely, I and screaming in a manner which, early a3 the hour was, speedily gathered a crowd into the previously empty street. At length the cord was got round his neck, and after a further short resistance he was strangled into insensibility. This done, the body was hitched up to a hook in the door-post of a neighboring butcher's shop, with the feet barely off the ground, and left to die out thus, under watch of a single Zaptich. As usual, there was no excitement amongst the spectators, and in less than half-an-hour after the murderer was dead, only some three or four loiterers lingered near the spot. About one p.m. the body was cut down and carried off in a sack for burial.