Kösem Sultan place of burial Sultan Ahmed Mosque
Eventually Kösem was betrayed to a halberdier by a piece of her dress that protruded from under the cabinet door. Dragged out by one of her assailants, she told him, "O brave man, be not cruel unto me", while tossing gold coins onto the floor as a distraction. One of the men then held her down, while they seized her garments, jewellery, bracelets, garters and other valuables. Her earrings, two chestnut-sized diamonds with a ruby beneath each diamond that had been given to her by her husband Ahmed, were torn apart by an Albanian man called Bostanci Ali Ağa; their estimated worth was thought to equal Egypt's entire annual income. Rycaut also mentioned the theft of a beautiful locket engraved with the names of her late sons Murad and Ibrahim.
Kösem was then dragged by her feet to the gateway leading from the harem into the Third Court, where Süleyman Ağa ordered his men to kill her. A group of four men, all of them young and inexperienced, then strangled her with a piece of cord ripped from the curtains. While the others drew the cord, one assassin climbed on her back and squeezed her neck although he stopped when Kösem bit his thumb. In retaliation, he struck her forehead, perhaps causing her to fall unconscious. Then, assuming she was dead, they screamed out, 'She is dead, she is dead!' and went to notify the sultan and his mother. Once they were out of sight, she lifted herself up again, presumably hoping to escape through a secret passageway, but as soon as her disappearance was noticed, the assassins were called back again and she was caught.According to Rycaut, the assassins then applied the cord for the second time, although the Ottoman renegade Bobovi, relying on an informant in the harem, claimed that she was strangled with her own hair. She is said to have struggled so much that blood from her ears and nose soiled the murderer's clothes. Once she had breathed her last, her body was dragged outside and shown to the Janissaries, before being moved into a room in the corridor of the Kuşhâne Kapısı (Aviary Gate).
The next morning, Kösem's body was taken from Topkapı Palace to the Old Palace (Eski Sarayı) to be washed. Rycaut described the funeral of the woman he referred to as the 'Queen': "The Black Eunuchs immediately took up the Corpse, and in a reverent manner laid it stretched forth in the Royal Mosch; which about 400 of the Queens Slaves encompassing round about with howlings and lamentations, tearing the hair from their heads after their barbarous fashion, moved compassion in all the Court." She was buried without ceremony in the mausoleum of her late husband Ahmed I. Her slaves were also taken to the Old Palace and eventually married to suitable Muslims with dowry money taken from her estate. Her vast estates and tax farms in Anatolia and Rumelia and other places, her jewellery, precious stones and twenty boxes of gold coins that she had hidden in the Büyük Valide Han near the Grand Bazaar were all confiscated by the treasury.
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