The investigation into the murder of Narin Güran, the eight-year-old girl who disappeared on 21 August and was found dead hidden in a river on 8 September, continues in Turkey, where the girl’s uncle, Salim Güran, was again subjected to interrogation before the prosecutor’s office this weekend in which he again denied all the accusations against him, responding with contradictory statements and phrases such as ‘I do not know’ or ‘I do not remember’ to the evidence and the contradictions in his testimony.
Turkish media reported that Salim Güran, who has been remanded in custody since 2 September as the main suspect in the crime, was taken from prison to Diyarbakır Courthouse on Saturday to testify again before three prosecutors in connection with the disappearance and murder of his niece. However, during the interrogation Salim reportedly had the same attitude he has maintained throughout the investigation, denying all the accusations against him and evasively answering the prosecutors’ questions.
Thus, when asked about the traces of Narin’s DNA found in his car, his uncle simply stated ‘I have nothing to say about that’ and argued that he had driven many children in his car. He also denied the accusations against him made by two of his employees, Mehmet Selim Atasoy and Ramazan Atasoy; the former was arrested a few days ago along with Narin’s mother and brother, while the latter was initially released under judicial control as a minor, but has been detained and interrogated again due to new evidence against him.
‘I don’t know why other members of the family deleted their calls’
Turkish media explains that when prosecutors asked Narin’s uncle why he deleted all calls and WhatsApp messages from his phone before 23 August, Salim reportedly replied that ‘I constantly delete data from my phone’ denying that the reason was to hide his involvement in his niece’s death, but to hide that he talked with with prostitutes. However, when prosecutors confronted this argument with the fact that other members of Narin’s family – including her mother and brother – also deleted data from their phones on 21 August (the day of the girl’s disappearance), when asked why they did the same, Salim merely replied that he did not know.
During the interrogation, Narin’s uncle also allegedly claimed that everything said by the suspect Nevzat Bahtiyar against him, including that it was Salim who gave him Narin’s body in a sack to dispose of it, is false. ‘Everything Nevzat Bahtiyar has said against me is a lie. I categorically did not call Nevzat on the day of the disappearance. Nor did I see him between 15:00 and 16:00. I only saw him in a crowd (in front of my house) after 20:00 when I was walking in the village. These statements are lies. I did not kill my niece Narin, nor did I load her body in my car and then hand it over to him,’ Salim said.
The prosecutors, as reported by the Turkish press, then asked him why, if he has stated that he was in the fields when Nevzat Bahtiyar phoned him on the day of the disappearance and also that he did not meet Nevzat Bahtiyar until 20:00, the analysis of the data traffic on his phone shows that the two were together that day between 15:21 and 15:46, as Bahtiyar himself has stated. When asked about this contradiction, Narin’s uncle repeated again that ‘I did not meet Nevzat Bahtiyar on the day of the disappearance, that is a lie, the data analysis is wrong’.
‘I don’t have it yet, it is not dead yet’
On the other hand, several media in Turkey have echoed in recent days other messages recovered from Salim’s phone; in one of these messages there is a conversation in Kurdish between Salim himself and Ramazan Atasoy, one of his employees (and also accused in the investigation) to whom Salim indicates talking in code that ‘there is something that belongs to you on that slope at the end’ in an area of the field, to which Atasoy replies ‘OK, I do not have it yet, it is not dead yet’.
Precisely, as a result of these revelations by a team of experts working on the Narin Güran murder investigation, Ramazan Atasoy – who despite an arrest order being issued against him had finally been released under judicial control last week because he is a minor – was detained and interrogated again by the Turkish authorities. When asked about the content of these conversations he had with Salim on 21 August – the day of the girl’s disappearance – at 8:33, 15:52, 18:37, 18:51, 18:52 and 18:54, Atasoy simply said that he did not remember any of these conversations.
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As a history lover, Pablo Gómez was captivated by Turkey from the first day he visited it in 2006: he got married there, has a house there… and has since become an expert on Turkey’s current affairs. With a long experience in media, he has been at the helm of hispanatolia.com since 2011.
