The Narin Güran Case #3
The day the information bomb was dropped
In today’s section there is no theory, no wordiness, there are “incidents.”
Perhaps the most critical day in the Narin case was 31 August. On that day, uncle Salim Güran, who was also the headman of the village, was taken into custody; the news reported that “suspicious DNA,” or DNA belonging to Narin, had been found in his vehicle. It was an extremely critical day, especially because of a post that a Facebook user named Murat Çınar Çatalca made that same day. That post would set the direction of both the media and social media and, it seems, of the case file itself. A month later it turned out to be fake, and afterward almost no one cared about it anymore, but it had two important features: First, it used some information that at that time was not known to the public but was known to those conducting the investigation (and to the lawyers, journalists, and politicians in contact with them); second, it laid the foundation for the “the family is terribly guilty” theory that would survive all the way to the judgment stage.
She Saw Something She Shouldn’t Have Seen
The argument “Narin saw something she shouldn’t have seen” was also first voiced on social media: the oldest trace of that phrase on social media goes back to 28 August; an account with not many followers and apparently choosing to remain “anonymous” wrote the following:
“A journalist on NTV identified the person. Someone very close. I think Narin saw something she shouldn’t have seen. I hope I’m wrong and Narin is found.”
The leaked procedures and information about Enes and the theories of these zealous champions of conscience were simmering day by day, moving toward becoming the “general public perception” on 31 August and afterward. The false claim that Enes and his friends “hurt/raped a dog” was showing signs of being merged with the campaign against government proposals about stray animals, and people were being called to the rally to be held in Yenikapı on 1 September 2024. The formula “Narin saw something she shouldn’t have seen” spread rapidly especially after Salim Güran’s arrest on 2 September, and would become virtually the essence and summary of the whole affair. Now, in order to approach 31 August day by day, it is useful to look closely at some critical posts:
The Detention of Salim Güran and the Accompanying Reports
When Salim Güran was detained on 31 August and arrested on 2 September, one of the claims accompanying this was that “DNA was found in the vehicle.” Nearly all newspapers and online outlets naturally shared the related reports; some (like TRT Haber or DW Türkçe) presented it as their own reporting, some quoted according to their style, some simply went with copy-paste. The “most editorially careful” versions included the following:
DNA found on the driver’s seat of S.G.’s vehicle matched the DNA taken from Narin Güran’s clothes and blanket. This development made the uncle a suspect.
It was also determined that the uncle, S.G., left the village quickly 15 minutes after Narin Güran was last seen with her friends.
Gendarmerie teams also examined the uncle’s phone. As a result of this examination, it was determined that S.G. had deleted WhatsApp messages and call logs from his phone.
Clearly these were gendarmerie-sourced details. The statement “it was determined that he left the village quickly 15 minutes after Narin Güran was last seen with her friends” was rather striking; even more striking was the “interaction” between the post from the fake Facebook account and this information.
A Fake News Bomb: Murat Çınar Çatalca
One of the incidents whose impact was later forgotten — the way it steered the process overshadowed — was the Murat Çınar Çatalca incident. On 31 August 2024, a certain MÇÇ left striking allegations in a comment under a Facebook post that Salim Güran had made on 15 August. That same day, an account with 300 followers took a screenshot of the FB comment and shared it on X without comment:
The message written by a man named Murat Çınar Çatalca on the social media account of Narin’s uncle..
Despite the limited follower count, it received 80,000 views, but it took another day or two for the matter to become publicly mainstream. The fact that content shared from anonymous or fake accounts could become mainstream within one or two days is of course partly a result of the catastrophic condition of the media, but on the other hand it raises suspicion that there were people acting with full awareness of that condition. This particular case is the most typical example of that.
The public only learned that MÇÇ was a fake account on 2 October 2024, from a report by Mustafa Şekeroğlu at Habertürk. Until then, hundreds of articles and thousands of posts treated what was written under that name as “the absolute truth,” and the content became, for millions of people, the greatest proof of reality. To this post, the lie “blood and vomit samples were found in Salim Güran’s car” was also added.
A Flood of Reports
An example report[2] using all of these elements together came out in the newspaper Sabah on 04.09.2024; I mention it only as an example, because A Haber, Gerçek Gündem, Halk TV, Takvim, CNN Türk, Karar, T24, and Türkiye, among others, all produced similar reports, and smaller news portals kept multiplying the same reports with slight variations.
In that report, another false piece of information pointing to the uncle was used:
A Haber correspondent Sinan Yılmaz gave details on Salim Güran’s statement in the case Turkey is talking about. The allegation was raised that Salim Güran had said to Narin’s father, “I will make you suffer such a pain that you will never forget it for the rest of your life.”
It was raised — but whether it was true or not was apparently not seen as important. MÇÇ’s statements were also included in the report, of course not forgetting to add the phrase “it was learned that he gave a statement to the gendarmerie.”
A Highly Assertive Report That Contains Its Own Contradiction
On the same 4 September, the halktv.com.tr site published a signed, “exclusive”-tagged report[3] titled “This is how the first clue in the Narin case was caught”. The sub-headline stated that Salim Güran had been arrested and said, “Uncle Güran was taken into custody because of a post he made on Facebook.”
I chose the Halk TV report partly because it was signed — relying both on institutional and personal trust — and partly because it was one of the earliest and most widely cited. Here too, as with the outlets that either quoted or produced their own versions, editorial work was highly limited.
The article stated, “First Çatalca’s statement was taken, then Uncle Güran was detained”; it did not say “it was claimed,” “it was alleged,” “it was said,” “it was reported,” “it was asserted,” etc. The writer and the publisher were sure. The situation was definite. But that certainty flipped in the last sentence of the article: “On the other hand, it was learned that the gendarmerie investigating the incident did not take the statement of any person named Murat Çınar Çatalca who commented on social media.”
In short, it seems that neither the two outlets I cited nor any outlet that quoted them or produced their own reports had actually opened and looked at the social media post — that is, the FB comment. Nothing about the user had been checked, the oddities in the content had not been scrutinized, it had simply been accepted as true. Until 2 October, when it was “definitively learned” that the account was fake and operating from abroad, there had been a downpour of news, video packages, TV programs, and posts. In another outlet (koza24), the sentence “it was learned that Çatalca went to the gendarmerie and gave a statement” was used confidently. On 4 September, A Haber, in its extensive report[4], featured snippets from the uncle’s interrogation, repeated Çatalca’s allegations without criticism, but did label them as “allegations.”
Yeni Şafak, for example, repeated the “he went and gave a statement” claim on 5 September and turned what he had written into news without any critical filter. Another site (TRHaber) repeated the same things on 9 September; it did not include the detail about “giving a statement.”
A “brand” like Milliyet, in a 10 September report that also included expert opinions, saw no problem in using the following phrasing: “DNA samples belonging to Narin Güran were found on the front seat of the car belonging to her uncle, who was arrested, Salim Güran. For Salim Güran, a gas station attendant named Murat Çınar Çatalca gave a statement to the gendarmerie saying ‘Either Narin was unconscious or Salim had strangled her with his own hands and she was lying on the front seat, and there was a dark brown blanket on top of her,’ and afterward the uncle was arrested.”
After Nevzat Bahtiyar was caught, on 11 September there was inevitably a report[5] titled “The gas station worker’s statements confirmed what Bahtiyar said”: “The words of a gas station employee who commented on Uncle Salim Güran’s social media account” had, it said, confirmed Bahtiyar’s statement.
By now not only the brother but also the uncle and the mother had been included almost definitively in the “guilty” lineup. Now we can look more closely at the content and form of the MÇÇ post; but this is already so long that I will leave that for the next section. In my next section, titled “The content, language, and tone of the information bomb,” (perhaps the most critical part), we will meet again.
External References (5)
Social Media Posts
1. The Geography Will Sell Out Anything to Save Its Own Skin
27 August, from an account with respectable followers:
The post was dropping the first hint of the arguments that would later, in September, be deployed by orientalist and colonialist masterminds, with the word geography.
2. Who Did the Mother Fear So Much That…
27 August, from a respectable account with 11,000 followers, which would receive
2.3 millionviews:3. A Person Who Kills an Animal Kills a Human
28 August 2024, a post:
This was a low-follower account with little engagement, but the post it quoted from 27 August had received
6,000likes,1,000reposts, and more than400,000views.4. What They Did to the Dog Cannot Be Ignored
5. Those Who Encourage Killing Dogs… Are Instigators
Post dated 28 August, one of the attempts to link animal rights activism to the case:
6. A 9-Million-Follower Account: “THE FAMILY AND THE UNCLE, IT’S ALL A BIT MESSY”
That same day, from a very famous and philanthropic musician’s account with more than
9 millionfollowers — which, compared to others, was “relatively” mild:As one would expect, it got
8 millionviews,52,000likes,5,000reposts, and over2,000replies, mentions, etc.One feature of the post was that it showed not only journalists and lawyers but also volunteers involved in social aid efforts had access to certain information; “the family’s relations are a bit messy,” coupled with “the authorities are also looking into this special situation,” tells us this. Let us note immediately that in the Murat Çınar Çatalca post there are insinuations of problematic relationships between Uncle-Brother and Uncle-Mother; this shows that the fake account holder and certain people around the case were feeding from the same pool of information.
In the comments below, the dog theory was voiced, the Minister of the Interior was mentioned, and people were saying things like “poor girl born into the wrong family.”
7. Poor Little Girl Born into the Wrong Family
Another deep-conscience post from 28 August:
One million views, seven thousand likes, and more than 650 reposts.
8. Educate Your Sons First, Not Your Daughters
9. The Whole Family Knows the Truth and Is Hiding It
Post dated 29 August:
The idea of trying to build a theory by reading the emotional state of the family members — “their facial expressions were more shock and panic than sadness” — was perhaps the most important issue caused by the leaks. Later, both in the publicly available documents of the main case and in the “aiding in concealing the perpetrator” case, we would see that this method was adopted by the investigation/prosecution units themselves.
10. A Post
On 31 August, a representative of an organization doing work in the public interest issued a warning to comply with the broadcast ban:
But the same person did not see any need to correct or remove their 27 August post “in line with the request not to publish unverified information”:
In response to that post, someone with 23,000 followers and respected followers wrote:
Note the emphasis on “them,” which, like the word “geography,” carries the markers of veiled hate speech.
In short, at that point the “harm to the dog” lie still seemed “relatively” plausible, but the broadcaster of the program had already issued a correction on 28 August — although who cares, really? Moreover, “the brother who’s going to the army” wasn’t Enes anyway, but does that matter? No one felt like deleting a post that had gotten
4.6 millionviews.