Among Narin Guran's remaining belongings are a child-size metallic pink rucksack, a dainty pair of glittery silver sandals and a cream sweatshirt printed with a picture of a unicorn.
They are packed away under a bed in her family home, their owner long gone.
The eight-year-old girl loved clothes, reading and going on car trips with her father. In August 2024, she was murdered.
“After Narin, there is no life left for me. I can breathe, but every minute and every second without Narin is death for me,” her father Arif Guran, 44, told The National in an interview beside his daughter’s grave.
The cemetery is located in a small village, a cluster of breezeblock and concrete buildings in south-eastern Turkey’s Diyarbakir province, where the family lived, and where Narin was killed.
Narin’s killing was one of the highest-profile child murder cases in Turkey in recent history. It was grimly un-unique in the country of 86 million people. According to the FISA Children's Rights Centre, a civil society group based in the capital, Ankara, at least 50 boys and girls lost their lives as a result of crimes including murder and domestic violence in the first eight months of 2025.
But for several reasons, Narin’s case shocked the nation more than most. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was personally following up on the case, to ensure the killers “receive the harshest punishment”.
The fallout from the case has produced so many allegations and counter-allegations over the identity of Narin’s killer that it has made headlines for over a year.
In December, her mother, Y. G., 45; her uncle, S.G., 46; and her older brother, E. G., 19; were handed aggravated life sentences for the murder of a child in concert. A neighbour and local construction worker, N.B., was sentenced to four and a half years in prison for “destroying, concealing or altering criminal evidence” after he admitted to dumping her body. In Turkey, an aggravated life sentence means the convict will stay in prison until he or she dies, although parole is possible after 30 years.
The decision of the local court is not final and is currently under appeal, set to be reviewed by the Supreme Court.
In its 929-page verdict, seen by The National, Diyarbakir Criminal Court said that it could not determine the person who actually murdered her. But per their findings, S.G., Y.G. and E.G. failed to intervene to stop her dying after someone began the act of her murder. “They did not prevent the person who initiated the act of killing, thereby participating in Narin's death,” the verdict read.
Arif Guran
There was “no hostility or reason,” for N.B. to kill Narin, the court said. But he failed to provide information as to her body’s whereabouts during the search operations, despite later admitting to having dumped her body.
Interviews with lawyers, family members and local officials, together with an analysis of nine court documents and CCTV footage, raised allegations of inconsistencies and gaps in the judicial proceedings.
In May this year, during the regional court appeal process, the presiding judge in Diyarbakir made observations about the quality and thoroughness of the investigation, citing “insufficient examination”. He dissented from other judges and said the sentences should be overturned, although they were ultimately upheld in line with the majority view. The trial has not yet been finalised.
Lawyers for E.G., Y.G. and S.G., who held the position of the village headman (muhtar in Turkish), say their clients are innocent. They are now appealing to Turkey’s Supreme Court of Appeals – known as Yargitay – for their sentences to be overturned.
The legal teams claim that the investigation into Narin’s murder was incomplete, rushed and reliant on flawed data as well as the neighbour’s testimonies, which changed significantly over the course. Intense public scrutiny of the case before court proceedings were complete meant that the family was subject to trial by the media, they claim.
“The presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial were disregarded, with hundreds of violations committed through conventional media and, sadly, social media, which has entered our judicial life with this case,” lawyers for E.G. wrote in his 102-page appeal document, seen by The National. They claimed the trial, which began in November 2024 and concluded the following month, was fast-tracked under intense public pressure.
A lawyer for the neighbour N.B., Adnan Atas, told The National that his client, “respects the court's decision and is awaiting the completion of his sentence”. He has not filed an appeal to the Supreme Court of Appeals because a local court rejected his appeal, and sentences of less than five years in Turkey cannot be reconsidered at higher levels.
The affair is a “complex and high-profile case,” that is “rarely seen in Turkey,” Mr Atas said. As courts in Turkey do not comment on pending cases, Diyarbakir’s courthouse did not respond to a request for comment.
The crime scene
August 21 2024 started like an ordinary summer day in the village home to fewer than 500 people. E. G. had returned from a labour job in a neighbouring province late the previous night. Y. G. rose early and went to pick okra from her vegetable patch.
Heat rolled over the low hills and vast plains that make up the landscape, part of an agriculture-rich region known as the Fertile Crescent. By 11am, it was nearly 40 degrees Celsius. Arif Guran had gone to a nearby city to deliver invitations for an upcoming family wedding. In the afternoon, Narin went to a Quran course held in the local mosque.
S.G., who worked with his brothers in farming, went out to check his fields and stayed out of the house all morning. He came home before 3pm and ate lunch before surfing online news sites, checking gold prices and accessing his mobile banking application, phone records and his court statements show. His phone was charging in a wall socket, the same records indicate. He later left the house again to return to the fields.
By 3.11pm, Narin had left her Quran course. With her friends, she walked past the local school, where she was caught on CCTV. She waved her companions goodbye and was never seen alive again.
What happened next is disputed. Diyarbakir's court ruled that Narin made it back up the hill to her home, where she was killed in the house or the surrounding barns. The Guran family lawyers believe that she was intercepted and killed before reaching her home. Just before 9pm that evening, Narin’s older brother, Baran, reported her missing to the emergency services.
Hundreds of search and rescue personnel, criminal investigators and the gendarmerie – Turkey’s rural police force – descended on the village to search for Narin. As the public grew increasingly shocked at the crime, a media frenzy began. That led to unsubstantiated rumours forming the basis of news stories and curbed the chance of a fair trial, according to Mustafa Demir, a lawyer for E.G. and Y.G.
“Newspaper reporters, of course, had limited information, but the headquarters constantly wanted news. With this news, journalists reported what they heard without verifying the small rumours from a few sources,” he told The National from his office in Diyarbakir city in September. The lawyers argue that such unfounded reports violated the right to a fair trial.
S.G. did admit in court to deleting certain WhatsApp messages that are unrelated to the murder. He was detained on August 31, after Narin’s DNA was found in his car.
The girl was missing for nearly three weeks before security forces recovered her body, dumped in a sack and covered with three heavy rocks in a stream separated from the village by a rough track and fields. Foliage and grass line the riverbank at the point where he eight-year-old’s body was dumped, and the land drops away into the water.
An autopsy showed that she had been strangled to death. Protests demanding justice for Narin and better child protection mechanisms broke out across Turkey. “This reaction showed that it was not just an individual incident, but rather an increase in demand for child safety and protection policies across the country,” Vahide Sevval Argunsah, a representative of the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, a rights group, told The National.
On the same day Narin’s body was recovered, N.B. confessed to driving to the stream and dumping her corpse. CCTV footage from a local farm showed a red car used by his family on one of the village’s outer roads in the moments after Narin went missing.
The neighbour, described by his lawyer Mr Atas as “one of the village’s poor people,” was known to the Guran family. “He was from our village; we had the same relationship with him as with other villagers,” Devran Guran, one of Salim’s sons, told The National. “He would go to the coffee house with my father.”
The neighbour denied killing Narin and laid the blame on S.G.. Mr Atas said it was a well-known fact in the village that his client had joined the search for Narin’s body, but alleged threats by S.G. prevented him from telling authorities where it was.
“My client stated that he did not make any statements regarding the body because he was under threat,” he said in written remarks to The National.
In questioning, a judge remarked on how normally N.B. behaved after dumping the body: he travelled to a family member’s home and drank tea with them.
'Our life is over'
The effect of Narin’s murder on the village is painfully obvious to see. There is little life in the community, which is eerily quiet, bar the squawking of turkeys and barking of dogs. The girl’s relatives who have not been convicted spend their days in a vigil at the cemetery.
In dark clothing, they gather mournfully at Narin’s graveside, which is decorated with plastic flowers and a teddy bear. For the past year, other children in the village have been scared to go outside alone, knowing that one of their friends was killed, Guran family members said.
“Now the grandchildren are scared to go to school because they are scared of being killed,” Narin’s paternal grandmother Leyla Guran told The National. “Everything is full of pain.”
With so many members of the Guran family in prison, the burden of childcare has fallen to the older generations, including Narin’s maternal grandmother, Remziye Cagbas. The frail 80-year-old has taken over daily chores and childcare tasks, while pained by the loss of Narin.
“I have no life left,” Remziye told The National. “I get up in the mornings, prepare their breakfast and wake them [remaining grandchildren]. My heart is hurting.”
Counsellors from Turkey’s Ministry of Family and Social Services have offered support to local children, which has helped them overcome the trauma of Narin’s murder, Guran family members said. All the same, the family and their lawyers say they have been socially isolated.
“Even relatives living in the city centre, even distant relatives, were subjected to social exclusion and bullying,” lawyer Mustafa Demir said. Some people’s mental state has been “seriously torn apart,” he added.
Supreme Court appeal
Diyarbakir’s court relied on several key documents to reach its verdict, including a study of mobile phone location data known as a “narrowed base study”, studies of CCTV footage, and testimonies provided during questioning.
Lawyers for her uncle S.G, her mother Y.G and brother E.G. dispute many of the court’s findings as well as the manner of the judicial proceedings.
“Our requests for evidence were completely ignored, our witnesses were not heard, and the arguments within the written evidence we submitted to the case file were ignored,” E.G.’s lawyers wrote in his appeal document. Y.G.’s legal team said there was “no conclusive and convincing evidence” to convict her of assisting in the act of her daughter’s murder.
Their trial date was set for two weeks after prosecutors filed an indictment, leaving the defence counsel insufficient time to prepare and violating the right to a fair trial, the lawyers said.
Onur Akdag, S.G.’s lawyer, said that Narin’s DNA found in his car was insufficient evidence to arrest his client. Family witness statements said Narin had played in and around the car many times before she was killed with her friends, and had travelled in the vehicle to attend a family party the previous month.
“The DNA found in the car was not blood, vomit, or urine. This is not suspicious. And it was not sufficient evidence,” Mr Akdag told The National.
Diyarbakir’s courthouse was unable to respond to detailed questions posed by The National about the allegations.
The neighbour N.B.’s statements about what happened on August 21 changed over the course of his questioning, and there are back-and-forth of allegations and counter-allegations between his and S.G.’s lawyers over the matter.
The neighbour told prosecutors that he was watering plants outside his home when S.G. called out to him from Arif’s home further up the hill. They drove to a dead end together, where S.G. gave N.B. the body and told him he had killed Narin. S.G. ordered N.B. to dump her corpse in exchange for 200,000 Turkish liras ($4,700), N.B claimed. “I didn't ask S.G. why or how he killed Narin Guran,” he said.
In a later statement, he said that S.G. called out to him from Arif’s house and urged him to come up. Together, S.G. and N.B. went inside, where Narin’s body was lying on the floor, a foamy liquid coming out of her mouth. N.B. said he took the body, wrapped in a blanket, and carried it back to his barn, where he put it in a sack before dumping it.
The Guran family and their lawyers say that N.B.’s changing statements mean his testimony is unreliable. For his part, Mr Atas pointed to “several different statements,” given by S.G. – inconsistencies that his lawyer Mr Akdag denies. The changes in N.B.’s versions of events were a result of threats from the village headman, Mr Atas claimed.
A second lawyer for Bahtiyar, Ali Ayrilmaz, who announced his departure from the case in October, did not respond to a request for comment. He previously told the BBC’s Turkish service that allegations against N.B. made by the Guran family were “an ugly accusation”.
'Unreliable' phone reports
After a judge handed down the sentences in Diyarbakir in December 2024, E.G. and Y.G.’s legal team requested an independent expert opinion on the phone records and location data reports used by the court in forming its verdict.
Tuncay Besikci, a digital forensics specialist who has worked on high-profile court cases in Turkey, spent about four months drawing up his report and a follow-up additional opinion, both of which were verified as authentic and viewed by The National.
It said that previous reports claiming S.G., Y.G. and E.G. were together in Arif Guran’s house when Narin was killed, and therefore participated in her murder, were unreliable. Those reports claimed to be able to use data from mobile phone base stations – technology within cell towers that performs signal processing – to pinpoint their locations to specific rooms within Arif’s house. Mr Besikci said this was impossible.
“It’s not a reliable metric at all,” Mr Besikci said in a phone interview with The National.
According to Mr Besikci's assessment, the original reports were “amateurish” and “lacked scientific rigour," and he claimed that they were carried out by individuals with no clear background in digital forensics, and before they took oaths regarding their work. An Excel spreadsheet containing assessments of the defendants’ supposed locations was also missing from the case file. “For these reasons, they cannot be considered ‘legal evidence,’” he wrote in his findings.
“In Turkey, I've seen this alleged technique crop up in one or two other cases where prosecutors couldn't find solid evidence, and felt pressure to find the culprit,” Mr Besikci told The National.
An examination of phone usage records also cast doubt on the verdict, Mr Besikci’s reporting said. A minute-by-minute study of S.G., Y.G., E.G. and N.B.’s phone records shows that S.G. was surfing multiple websites, and that he accessed his mobile banking app to pay a phone bill between the time Narin was last seen on CCTV and when N.B.’s red car was caught on camera taking her body to dump it in the stream.
“The mobile banking application requires you to authorise that it is really you,” Mr Besikci said.
E.G. and Y.G.’s phone records were consistent with their testimonies, in which they said they were at home resting when Narin went missing.
N.B. phoned S.G. just after 3pm, which he said was to report a problem with his water supply. There was then no activity on his phone until just before 5pm bar a two-second period.
For Mr Besikci, the reports used to reach the verdict ignored phone usage data that contradicts their claims about Narin's relatives' whereabouts and actions after the girl went missing.
“I honestly believe this case could become Turkey's own Dreyfus Affair,” Mr Besikci told The National, referring to a case in France at the turn of the 20th century in which a man was wrongfully convicted of treason.
Lawyer Adnan Atas said that Mr Besikci’s expert opinion “cannot be relied upon” because he had not acted impartially.
Conflicting CCTV reports
The court also said it used CCTV analysis from the day of Narin’s murder to reach its conclusion that she reached the area around her home, where the court said she was killed.
A report by an Istanbul-based criminal investigation agency, the National Criminal Bureau, said that a dark shadow near Narin’s home could have been her.
S.G.’s lawyer, Mr Akdag, disputes the report’s findings. He claims that the National Criminal Bureau report erroneously attributed fixed blackouts and possible pixel shifts around the Guran family home to human movement, and made the impossible assessment that Narin climbed the steep hill to her home in less than one minute, based on CCTV timings. The analysis is “completely flawed,” Mr Akdag wrote in his appeal document.
Another report by a German forensics specialist, Dr Dirk Labudde, suggested there was human movement in the area. In response to questions from The National, Dr Labudde said he stood “without reservation” by his findings, which were “prepared in accordance with recognised forensic standards.”
Mr Akdag requested another examination of the CCTV. A Delhi-based digital forensics firm, Brilliant Forensic Investigation, used various techniques to enhance the footage, from a military base around 800 metres away, to the highest possible quality. The National viewed the enhanced video – still a grainy and blurry set of images – provided by Mr Akdag.
The enhancement showed two black moving dots, one small and one large, appearing on a track passing N.B.’s house, and leading towards Narin’s house, in the minutes after she was last seen on the higher-quality school CCTV. Aspect-ratio analysis found that both dots were human-sized, although one is visibly smaller than the other.
The large shadow follows the small shadow, before they merge, “indicating a likely confrontation or collision,” said the BFI report, dated June 2025, which The National verified as authentic with the company office in Delhi. There is more movement before both shadows disappear from the frame.
In his statements, N.B. had said that he was standing outside his house when S.G. called out to him, urging him to go to Arif Guran's house. From there, he said he took Narin's lifeless body and walked back to his own barn with it in his arms, to place it in a sack.
“No movements were detected of N.B. moving from his home towards Arif's house, its annexes, or nearby barn,” the BFI report said. It added that a more obvious human shadow carrying Narin’s body should be visible, per N.B.'s testimony, but “no such shadow movement was observed.” The report concluded that N.B.’s statements “contradict” the CCTV footage.
Mr Akdag has added the BFI report to the file sent to the Supreme Court of Appeals. Mr Atas declined to comment, saying he was “awaiting the high court's decision before reviewing the report and seeking the opinions of different experts”.
The Istanbul-based National Criminal Bureau did not respond to a request for comment from The National, as institutions involved in ongoing criminal proceedings are not permitted to.
Turkey’s child protection problem
The problem of violence against children in Turkey stretches beyond Narin’s case. Women’s rights activists in the country say that there has been an increase in both the visibility of and actual number of killings of women and girls – femicide – cases in recent years.
The We Will Stop Femicide Platform said that 72 females younger than 18 were killed across the country during 2024 – a rise from 13 in 2023 and 33 in 2022.
Ms Argunsah, from the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, believes that social dynamics in Turkey have contributed to a real rise in violence against women and children. A years-long economic crisis, including double-digit inflation, has squeezed families.
“Economic vulnerability, power relations, gender roles, divorce processes, perceptions of authority within the family, and a sense of impunity are factors that fuel violence, especially from those close to the victim,” she said.
The Turkish state needs to improve women's and children's access to safe shelters and support services, and MPs need to push for budget allocations for women's and children's protection services, Ms Argunsah added.
Some politicians blame patriarchal frameworks in Turkey’s education system and politics for engendering a sense of male superiority and impunity.
“We cannot stop these murders unless preventing such cases and taking measures against femicide become a state policy,” Serhat Eren, a Diyarbakir MP from the Peoples' Equality and Democracy Party, told The National in an interview.
We Will Stop Femicide Platform
For its part, the Turkish government says it takes child protection very seriously. The country’s child rights strategy for 2023-2028 says it puts forward plans to “prioritise child rights” and “strengthen protective and preventive service mechanisms”.
Unicef, the UN’s children’s agency, says Turkey has a “broad range” of services designed to address child protection risks and violations, but the coverage and quality of these services “vary widely,” and more specialised social workers are needed at a local level.
'What future?'
Arif Guran remembers how his daughter Narin would greet him with abundant affection.
“When she woke up in the morning, she would jump on my neck, kiss me and say ‘good morning’,” he said. “When I came home, she would come running to me and hug me, saying ‘Daddy, welcome home’.”
The identity of Narin’s killer may never be known. The Supreme Court of Appeals may rule on S.G., E.G. and Y.G.s’ appeals against their life sentences by the end of this year, but nothing is certain, the Guran family lawyers said. In October, three other family members, who had been held for over a year for “favouring the criminal”, were released after their files were overturned on appeal at the regional court.
But one thing is clear. The case will be remembered in Turkey, both for its gut-wrenching details and the competing narratives over what really happened on that summer day last year.
“I'm certain that in years to come, this will be studied in the law faculties, analysed in books, maybe portrayed in documentaries and dramas, and remembered as a landmark in Turkish legal history,” the digital forensics specialist Mr Besikci said.
For now, Narin’s father Arif Guran finds it hard to imagine what the future might look like. “We are talking about a family that has been completely destroyed,” he said. “What kind of future can they have?”
