Narin Güran Case #4
(Dis)information bomb shrapnel
On 31 August 2024, the day Salim Güran was taken into custody, a post appeared on Facebook (again, in response to an earlier post by Salim Güran) which the media/social media immediately and unquestioningly jumped on. It was written by someone named “Murat Çınar Çatalca,” and the “timing,” language, content—everything about the text was striking.
First, the full text:
Salim Güran is the mukhtar of the village. In the HTS records there are both messages and call logs with Narin Güran’s mother before and after the incident, on the day of the incident 15–20 minutes after Narin disappeared Salim Güran left the village quickly in his own vehicle, he doesn’t even get fuel, he enters a gas station, he buys wet wipes from the market. the camera records were obtained I swear. I myself gave the camera records to the gendarmerie commander and I was asked not to share anything from the footage and I was even told I would be penalized if I gave these pieces of evidence to the media. This mukhtar was also in contact with Narin’s brother Enes. According to the phone records after the incident and in the camera footage unfortunately Narin is either unconscious or lying in the front seat strangled by Salim’s hands and there was a dark brown blanket on top of her. Since the gas station staff also knew the mukhtar there was no doubt and also the mukhtar’s phone was off and he returned to the village in the dark 2 hours later. This time when he returned to the village he acted as if he knew nothing and cried and pretended to be sad saying what happened to Narin. This mukhtar is both a loan shark and an immoral person he is a dishonorable man.
It did not stop there, another user named Yusuf Mahir Koçyiğit stepped in, he wrote the following:
Friends, Murat Çınar is the market attendant of the gas station we work at. What he says is true. There is no mistake or lie in it. This dishonorable lowl… Salim Güran comes to the gas station driving the vehicle fast. He buys wet wipes. He does not park the vehicle in front of the market, he parks it near the car washing area. He buys wet wipes, gets into the vehicle and leaves. If anyone who says these true pieces of information are lies is honorable, decent, dignified and is not a partner in the filth of that Salim Güran cur, let them call the gendarmerie and ask whether it is true or a lie. If a hair on Murat’s head is harmed there will not be a stone left on another stone in that village. No one will have honor or personal safety. No one should threaten Murat.
Then another account appeared, named Murat Akkaya, this is what he wrote:
For hours I have been threatened with death by Salim Güran’s elder brother, his younger brother, his family and his wife’s family. Threat and insult messages have been sent to me. The owner of the gas station I work at has been threatened.
The Report Published on the Day of Custody
Before moving on to the analysis of these texts, a reminder: the same day, a significant report based on information given by law enforcement was also published. This report, which appeared on DW Turkish, was used by many sites in line with their own style (some of them even made it a “gallery,” that is, they put one or two sentences under each photo with many photos). The report included the following information:
DNA found on the driver’s seat of the vehicle used by S.G. matched the DNA samples taken from Narin Güran’s clothes and blanket. This development made the uncle a suspect.
In addition, it was determined that uncle S.G. left the village quickly 15 minutes after his niece Narin Güran was last seen with her friends.
The gendarmerie teams also examined the phone of the detained uncle. As a result of the examination, it was determined that S.G. had deleted WhatsApp messages and calls from his phone.
The journalist who accessed this information was one known for doing their job well, and it was natural for the report to be shared, but the Facebook post contained parallel content and, because it featured a kind of story, a scenario, it spread in an unbelievable way in a short time; now, with this information, let us look at the Murat Çınar Çatalca post sentence by sentence:
Reference to the 28 August Post
The following part in the first sentence of the text takes us to the “family and uncle relations are a bit complicated” expression in the X post shared on 28 August from a very strong account with 9 million followers:
“In the HTS records there are both messages and call logs with Narin Güran’s mother before and after the incident.”
Its immediate continuation, however, overlaps with the information in the report on DNA published the same day:
“… on the day of the incident 15–20 minutes after Narin disappeared Salim Güran left the village quickly in his own vehicle, he doesn’t even get fuel, he enters a gas station, he buys wet wipes from the market.”
The news sentence in the report may not be particularly striking due to its dryness, but it is obvious that it will be highly striking within a narrative, because it is not only reported that he left, it is also stated that he left quickly. Moreover, the supposedly factual detail that he bought wet wipes from the market has a special importance, as very few expressions could better convey that he had done a dirty job.
The fact that the camera footage was given to the gendarmerie commander and would not be given to the media, etc. is not written merely as ornament; these are used as elements to increase credibility, an early answer to the sort of social media question “then why is there no footage”: There isn’t any because the gendarmerie took it, and in fact it is a crime to give it. Another critical sentence in the post that takes us back to the famous account’s statement “family relations are complicated” is this: “This mukhtar was also in contact with Narin’s brother Enes.”
A Timeline Embedded in the Post
Thus, uncle and mother were seated next to the brother who had already been marked as guilty through the dog/cannabis frenzy since 27 August. But the issues in this short post are not limited to these:
“and in the camera footage unfortunately Narin is either unconscious or lying in the front seat strangled by Salim’s hands and there was a dark brown blanket on top of her.”
The most critical point of this part of the post, as will be discussed later, is not so much that the child is “either unconscious or strangled by Salim’s hands,” but that she is in the front seat. According to the report published the same day, Narin’s DNA sample was found on the front seat.
The last sentences are not insignificant either: for those who might ask “would a man carrying a strangled child on the front seat go into a gas station,” the following sentence was written preemptively: “Since the gas station staff also knew the mukhtar there was no doubt…” On the other hand, the fact that he entered the gas station “quickly” and parked the car not in front of the market or at the pump but by the car wash had skillfully inserted suspicion into the text without explicitly stating it.
The critical point of the remaining expressions is: “… his phone was off (…) and he returned to the village in the dark 2 hours later…”
The information in the post was not only in parallels with the information in the report published and widely shared that day, it was also in special and careful harmony with another piece of information that was not yet known to the public at that time: upon the statement of some children that they had seen Narin at 17:40, law enforcement had focused the investigation around that time, as we later learned. The report said, “it was determined that he left the village 15 minutes after Narin was last seen,” but no time was given for the departure. The post, however, was arranged exactly according to that time, namely the 17:40 information: he comes quickly, buys wet wipes, leaves, and returns in the dark two hours later.
Either a Journalist, or a Lawyer, or Law Enforcement
A journalist reports the news, their source may naturally be law enforcement or other bureaucrats and lawyers in close cooperation with law enforcement, there is no need to repeat the criticism of information leaks by law enforcement, it is a situation we have already become accustomed to but we should not become accustomed to. So who made the post? Who could know so many things? Who could hope to gain what from such a post?
The post itself does not provide evidence on this, of course, but it gives some clues, some data to think with: the text was written by someone who knows incident reporting, little attention was paid to spelling, but this carelessness may carry the possibility of being deliberate, considering the narrative skill. Incident reporting, and being able to embed subtext into it, is not something that can easily be done by people with no experience in this field. Therefore, the likelihood is very high that this text was written by a journalist, a lawyer, or a law enforcement officer.
The fact that the text was drafted in a way that observed consistency with other information (reports and/or posts) that became public between 27 and 31 August is an indication that this was not some kind of trolling activity, something written by a random person just to stir things up—in other words, it is an indication that it could not have been a coincidence.
The user named Yusuf Mahir Koçyiğit, who interacted with this post, was both entering the scene in the role of “the wine-seller’s witness is the pitcher-seller” and, with a tone that would prompt and cue aggressive statements against Salim Güran, was triggering those statements.
The account named Murat Akkaya became the first virtual personality to extend the issue to the whole family, and also formed one of the prototypes of statements against the family: “For hours I have been threatened with death by Salim Güran’s elder brother, his younger brother, his family and his wife’s family. Threat and insult messages have been sent to me. The owner of the gas station I work at has been threatened.” The Akkaya personality, with phrases like “he was sweaty, tense, panicked” for Salim Güran, and with an equally effective narrative deliberately careless about spelling, such as “he asked for wet wipes, he took three,” or “he first said cash, he checked his pockets, there was no cash, then he paid by credit card, those slips were given to the police,” also managed to increase the credibility of the matter.
The reports that leaned on these posts spread rapidly especially after 4 September. In the meantime, some social media users posted that the accounts were suspicious, that they could be fake, but both the “digital public” that had now “found the truth, and that truth along with a good/explanatory story tied to it” and, unfortunately, the journalists, had no time to bother with such things. The public could only learn that the accounts were fake on 2 October, but again, no one went back and corrected their reports, let alone undertook any research into examining the effect those posts had caused and their source.
There Is Still an MÇÇ on Facebook
When searched on FB today, a user named Murat Çınar Çatalca still appears. There is information that he is a lawyer, that he joined in April 2015, he made just one post on 9 May 2017, a visual from the Behzat Ç. series, which reads: “There is a full parliamentary system reigning in me, I mean a different voice comes from every head but whatever I say goes.” (Accessed: 26.10.2025) It got nine likes. There is a heading that says 700 friends but when clicked it does not open.
There is little info in info: we learn that he is male, born in 1989, and speaks Kurdish and English.
There is a favorite quotes section, and there is an answer to it: “Heger em nebin yek, eme herin bı yek u yek..” (I did not touch the spelling.)
Is there a connection between this user and him? Is this a real user but the post that stirred things up was fake? It is not possible to know. Not for us mortals, at least; but in an ideal judicial process, should all the means not be mobilized to find out who made such a strange, critical, and openly investigation-related post/posts? Is the Turkish judiciary’s capacity for examining digital matters limited to “Fake, opened from abroad” findings? Are not all public institutions, including universities and companies, obliged to provide the judiciary with the information, equipment, and research facilities they possess when necessary? Even if the accounts were opened from abroad, the information is highly insider.
I will continue, we are still on 31 August.
NOTES
We learned that the post was fake on 2 October 2024 from a report[1] by Murat Şekeroğlu at HaberTürk. In the report, there was also a perspective indicating that the post had similarities with the statements given by Nevzat Bahtiyar, who had by then been arrested. However, in my opinion, the relation with those statements is a different matter, I will return to that in later sections, the truly important aspect is that it was in harmony with the information and developments between 27 and 31 August, and that it later determined the direction of the reports and was treated almost as a case/information that pre-approved the developments.
In his work The Media’s 12 Mistakes Faruk Bildirici also discussed this case in detail. Because Brother Faruk is a polite person he called them mistakes, whereas a very significant part of these are nothing but professional misconduct.
One of the people who had addressed the issue earlier was also Rana Polat Sönmez. The relevant section in Rana Polat Sönmez’s article[2] deals with the issue of time in a different way but in a way that produces the same result, and also uses an important detail about Güran’s vehicle in a meaningful way:
The investigations revealed that the accounts in question were fake; there was no such gas station and no such employees as claimed. Moreover, for Salim Güran to have left the village, stopped at such a gas station and returned, did not fit into the time interval of the incident.
During the first hearing, Nevzat Bahtiyar was asked whether he had seen these posts; he replied, “I did not see, but I heard.”
However, there was a common aspect between these posts and Bahtiyar’s statement that pointed to material evidence: it was consistent with the DNA data detected in Salim Güran’s vehicle. What was interesting was that these posts were published on the day the DNA detection was made. Moreover, the posts gave the impression that they were aware of the investigation’s scenarios. Mother Yüksel Güran and brother Enes Güran were being pointed to, and the communication traffics, which we frequently heard from the media and which are now understood to be baseless, were mentioned. As for uncle Salim Güran, a scenario was constructed based on the image of him leaving the village at 18:55.
Carrying a corpse in the front seat was not an ordinary thing either, but someone who knew Salim Güran’s vehicle could put forward such testimony only in this way; since the rear windows of the vehicle were tinted.
ABOUT THE TITLE: THE DISINFORMATION REVOLUTION
The Information Bomb is the title of a book by the French thinker Paul Virilo. Based on the atomic bomb, “Just as the radioactivity of the components of matter made the atomic bomb possible, so does the interactivity of the components of information…” makes this bomb possible.
The book, which deals with striking theses such as modern science’s departure from its philosophical foundations and taking different paths, states that today the mental analogical approach is steadily fading, and instrumental and numerical approaches are taking its place. “Unlike in the past, science, which now depends on effectiveness rather than truth, is being dragged towards its own collapse, towards a civilizational degeneration.” (Paul Virilo, The Information Bomb, translated by Kaya Şahin, Metis Yayınları)
If we put media instead of science here, the sentence becomes more suitable for these writings. The situation of the media is too bad to be described merely by the word bad, even the word degeneration may remain an innocent expression.
While saying, “Following the atomic bomb, which shattered matter with radioactive energy, at the end of the millennium there emerged the specter of a second bomb. This bomb is the information bomb that, through the interactivity of information, has the power to shatter peace between nations,” Virilo, in line with the themes of the book, is mostly thinking of international issues and the course of the world. Yet his highly prescient book also helps us understand today that not only peace between nations but also peace between societies, peace within societies, and increasingly society itself is being shattered.
The book also contains observations that will help us understand what has been happening around the Narin Güran case, both as media and as society, it is possible to say that we are floundering beside the usual technical problems of communication, in the frightening traps brought about by instantaneous commenting, Virilo says: “These precursory signs show that the real information revolution is in fact the virtual disinformation revolution.”
External References (2)