Soghomon Tehlirian §

Born in Pakarij (Erzincan vilayet) in 1896; lost most of his immediate family in the deportations of summer 1915, an experience he later recounted on the Berlin witness stand. Recruited into Operation Nemesis, the ARF's clandestine programme to kill the senior CUP perpetrators, he tracked Talaat Pasha to Charlottenburg in Berlin and shot him at point-blank range on 15 March 1921. The ensuing two-day trial (2–3 June 1921) became a landmark forum for the Armenian case: Lepsius and others testified to the genocide, and the jury acquitted Tehlirian after roughly an hour's deliberation, accepting that the act was psychologically determined by the trauma of 1915. He lived afterwards in Yugoslavia, France and finally the United States, dying in San Francisco in 1960 and buried at Ararat Cemetery in Fresno. The Berlin trial transcript and Tehlirian's acquittal influenced Raphael Lemkin's later coining of the term "genocide".