Bahaeddin Şakir

He was born in 1874 at Sliven (İslimiye) in Ottoman Bulgaria, into a Circassian family; his father was Mehmed Şakir Bey. After the Military Medical Academy in Istanbul, where he specialised in histology, he was exiled to Damascus for Unionist activity, escaped to Paris in 1899 and worked with Ahmed Rıza's Young Turk circle, then returned after the 1908 revolution. The Turkish article names him the founder of forensic medicine in Turkey and the author of its first copyrighted textbook in the field. ^{1 2}

Şakir sat on the CUP's central committee, wrote for and directed Şûrâ-yı Ümmet, organised the party's provincial branches, and during the First World War headed the political section of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa (Special Organization). The English article quotes his letter of 3 March 1915 to a provincial official and describes, citing Dadrian, Kieser and other scholars, his role in ordering and supervising the deportations in the eastern provinces and his work to keep the Unionist network alive after the 1918 armistice, through the Karakol organisation in Istanbul and exile in Berlin. ¹

On 17 April 1922, on Uhlandstraße in Charlottenburg, Berlin, Armenian operatives Arshavir Shirakian and Aram Yerganian shot him dead, together with Cemal Azmi, under the Armenian Revolutionary Federation's Operation Nemesis. He was buried in the cemetery of Berlin's Şehitlik Mosque. ^{1 2}

No source records any affiliation for him. The English article describes his pan-Turkist and Turanist politics and his wartime role without any statement of his own belief; one journal article it cites discusses the deportations in religious terms, which is a claim about the event, not about him. The Turkish article is likewise silent, and Wikidata carries no religion value for his item, so this record states none. ^{1 2 3}

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