The trial for the murder of eight-year-old Narin Güran, who went missing at the end of August and whose lifeless body was found on 8 September in a river with signs of having been strangled, began on Thursday in Diyarbakır province in southeastern Turkey, amid great expectation for the testimony of the main defendants in the case – the girl’s mother, one of her brothers, her uncle, and a neighbour accused of throwing the body into the river – for whom the prosecution is seeking a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
The first hearing of the trial was held today, Turkish news agencies reported, with the testimony of Nevzat Bahtiyar, the neighbour who himself confessed to hide the girl’s lifeless body in a river near the village where she lived after the girl’s uncle, Salim Güran, the village headman (muhtar) of Tavşantepe village and Bahtiyar’s employer, allegedly handed it over to him after he murdered the girl, according to Bahtiyar’s testimony.
In his statement to the court, Bahtiyar reiterated his confession to the police, insisting that he was not involved in the girl’s murder, but that his role was limited to hiding the body on Salim’s instructions: ‘The (girl’s) uncle Salim Güran told me that he killed Narin because she had seen them having sex with the mother’.
According to Bahtiyar, the crime was allegedly committed in the house where Narin lived and the girl’s mother witnessed the murder. The man denied any coercion or blackmail against Salim or that he had been offered money in exchange for taking responsibility for the crime (as claimed by other witnesses), and reiterated in court that Salim threatened to kill his son if he refused to hide the child’s body. He also explained that he did not know the exact details of the crime, indicating that he had gone to the house where Narin lived with her family after the murder.
The child saw something she was not supposed to know
The case has aroused enormous expectation across the country, where shock still lingers over a crime in which the girl’s own family is implicated, to the extent that they tried to obstruct the investigation and hide the evidence. Based on phone signals – which indicate that the four main accused were at Narin’s house at the time of the crime – the prosecution believes that they acted together, even though Narin’s mother, brother and uncle insist on denying all allegations and pointing to Bahtiyar as the sole culprit.
One of the main questions surrounding the murder of little Narin Güran is why the killer or killers decided to take her life. From the beginning of the investigation, it has been suggested that the girl may have seen something she was not supposed to know, and Bahtiyar’s confession about a possible illicit relationship between her mother and uncle may, to some extent, help to clarify that point.
Both the mother and Salim deny that they had a relationship, and Narin’s father, Arif Güran, has also ruled out an extramarital affair between the two, insisting that there is CCTV footage that would prove the family’s innocence. The fact is, however, that both the defendants and other family members – not the father – deleted all calls, messages and WhatsApp audios since the day of the crime, without so far providing a convincing explanation.
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Edited and reviewed by:
Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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