A MURDERED SULTAN.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2536, 7 May 1881, Page 2

A MURDERED SULTAN.

After a period of nearly five years, we learn on the authority of the telegram we published dated April 23, that Abdul Aziz, who was deposed from the throne of Turkey in 1876, and was afterwards reported to have committed suicide, was in reality murdered by his servants. The Sultan Abdul after his deposition, was sent from the Dolmabalabe Palace across the Bosphorus. In this confinement he seemed plunged into such depths of melancholy that the people of his household deemed it expedient to remove all weapons beyond his reach. Early on a Sunday morning in May, 1876, the Sultan was found dead, lying half way across the sofa with his feet on the floor in a great pool of blood. Nineteen physicians of different nationalities were at once summoned. The direction and nature of the wounds, as well as the instrument which was said to have produced them, caused them to arrive at the conclusion that the case was one of suicide." Although the opinion was general at the time that Abdul Aziz bad been secretly made way with, it is only now ■ascertained for certain by the confession of the servants at the Sultan’s palace at Constantinople that it was they who had murdered the Sultan by first suffocating him, and then opening his veins.