Hafız Mehmet

His testimony of the event is considered by genocide scholar Vahakn Dadrian as one of the "rarest corroborations of the fact of the complicity of governmental officials in the organization of the mass murder of Armenians".

Hafız Mehmet witnessed such drownings of Armenians off the coast of Ordu, near Trabzon, and provided testimony of his eyewitness accounts during a 21 December 1918 parliamentary session of the Chamber of Deputies: God will punish us for what we did [Allah bize belasını verecektir] ...the matter is too obvious to be denied.

Under the pretext of sending off to Samsun, another port city on the Black Sea [about 255 km west of Trabzon], the district's governor loaded the Armenians into barges and had them thrown overboard.

[10] Mehmet testified that he attempted to stop the massacres by trying to speak with Interior Minister Talaat Pasha directly but that Talat never responded to his inquiries and never questioned the actions of the politicians in Trabzon.

[10][13] Hafız Mehmet's testimony is considered by genocide scholar Vahakn Dadrian as a representation of the "rarest corroborations of the fact of the complicity of governmental officials in the organization of the mass murder of the Armenians.