THE ARMENIANS.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 219, 3 January 1917, Page 3

THE ARMENIANS.

MORE HORRORS INFLICTED. LONDON, Dec. 31. The "Times" publishes the first reports from reliable Mohammedan sources of the Armenian atrocities supplied by two Mussulman eye-witnesses. An official of standing has testified to fchcrii veracity. The first eye-witness paw in August, 1915, in the suburbs of Mush, large numbers of dead men. women and children shot or stabbed, and most horribly mutilated. Numbers of bodies floated in the river. At Bitlis the smell was terrible and the water, undrinkable. Five hundred Armenians were locked in a stable near Mush. Through an opening in the roof gendarmes threw flaming torches. All the Armenians were burned alive. Between Hinis and Keiu he saw a valley filled With the bodies of little children. Thousands were thrown into the Euphrates. Many committed suicide, fearing a worse deatk.

The second eye-witness was a nieniber of the court-martial at Trebizond in July, 1915, which ordered the deportation of all Armenians to the interior. He knew that deportation meant massacre en route. Men were shot and women and children plundered and outraged and murdered by organised bands. At Trebizond the children were taken to sea in boats, placed in sacks i and thrown out into the sea. The best looking women were picked out by the Government officials,, outraged and murdered . At Kamash he saw in prison a Kurdish chieftain, Murza Bey. He said: "We have killed 70,000 Armenians; now I am arrested for striking a gendarme." Afterwards he was secretly executed. The massacres were ordered as part of the Young Turks' settled policy of exterminating all non-Turkish races in the Ottoman Empire. The motive was political, not religious. He saw no German officers actually engaged in supervising the massacres. The German military in Turkey were aware of them, but they have made no attempt to stop them.