Nineteen days after she went missing, the body of Narin Guran was found on September 8 in a sack in a river in Diyarbakir, around one kilometer from the village of Tavşantepe where she lived with her family.
The fact that it took authorities so long to locate Narin’s body and that it was found in a previously searched river have led to speculation about whether there was a deliberate attempt not to locate the girl’s body.
As of now, 12 people including the girl’s mother and one of her brothers have been arrested among more than 20 people who have detained in connection to the murder.
One of the suspects is Salim Guran, the girl’s uncle and also the mukhtar of the village, who was arrested on September 3 on suspicion of murder and deprivation of liberty after DNA samples taken from his car matched DNA on the girl’s clothes.
Hatimogullari was in Tavsantepe on Wednesday with a group of local politicians and lawmakers from her party where she visited the grave of the little girl and talked about an attempt to cover up the murder.
“Why did the authorities hide Narin’s killer for 19 days, and how she was killed? What are they hiding in Tavşantepe? Law enforcement, which has the means to solve murders committed by the most professional criminal gangs, has used all its experience and knowledge to obscure answers to why and how the little girl was murdered,” said Hatimogullari.
Although there are 12 people in pretrial detention in connection to the murder, the motive behind Narin’s murder, her killers and the way she was killed remain a mystery.
The results of the autopsy have not yet been released. Even if they are, they won’t be able to shed much light on the murder since the girl’s body had begun to decompose when it was found due to high temperatures in the region and because it was submerged in water for such a long time.
Turkish media outlets ran stories on Tuesday claiming that the initial results of the autopsy indicate that the girl was strangled to death. However, Nahit Eren, head of the Diyarbakır Bar Association, said there is currently no initial report in the investigation file.
Hatimogullari said Narin’s body was deliberately left in a sack in a river, where it was weighed down with stones to make sure that it decomposed and left no trace of the murderers.
“How can an ordinary person know this? Only people with special knowledge about this can know it. … If this had been an ordinary murder, the perpetrators would not have received so much professional support,” said Hatimogullari, likening Narin’s murder to a 1996 traffic accident in Turkey, known as the Susurluk case, which exposed the shady relationship between the state and mafia groups.
She said just as the Susurluk case exposed the “dirty relationship” between the state and the mafia, Narin’s murder has exposed the shadowy relationship between the government and paramilitary forces in the girl’s village.
She said if the murder had been committed by Narin’s family alone, it would have been solved long ago.
The DEM Party co-chairperson also criticized the lack of an investigation into Galip Ensarioglu, a lawmaker from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) who sparked a backlash on social media when he said, following the discovery of the girl’s body, that the members of the Güran family are friends of his and that he wants to avoid things that will further hurt them.
Hatimogullari said her party has filed a criminal complaint against Ensarioglu.
Meanwhile, a photo began to circulate on social media on Wednesday purportedly showing Narin’s uncle, Salim Guran, currently under arrest, among a couple of local politicians and mukhtars from Diyarbakır hosted by Ensarioglu in the parliament last December.
Ensarioglu tweeted about the visit with a photo on December 27, 2023 mentioning Güran among the names of his guests.
Ferhat Encu, a Kurdish politician and a former lawmaker, said the photo explains why solving Narin’s murder has become so complicated.
Turkish media outlets, which have been running speculative stories about the motive and perpetrators of the murder for days, have focused on an alleged affair between the girl’s mother and uncle as the reason for the murder, presumably because the girl witnessed it.
The mother in her statement to the prosecutor denied having an affair with her brother-in-law but could not explain the two phone calls she made to him on the day of the murder.