Eight-year-old Turkish girl Narin Guran was strangled, postmortem exam shows

Body was discovered stuffed in a sack and dumped in a river in south-east of country

Protesters in Istanbul hold portraits of Narin Guran, eight, whose body was found 19 days after she went missing from her home in Turkey's Diyarbakir province last month. AFP

Narin Guran, an eight-year-old girl whose disappearance and death sparked widespread anger in Turkey, was strangled on the day she went missing, a postmortem examination has found.

Narin's body was found in a sack that was dumped in a river in the south-eastern province of Diyarbakir on September 8, almost three weeks after she disappeared after attending Quran study in her village of Tavsantepe.

The cause of her death was “asphyxiation as a result of closure of the mouth and nose and compression of the neck”, said the head of the Diyarbakir Bar Association, Nahit Eren. He was quoting an unpublished report of the postmortem examination carried out by Istanbul's Forensic Medicine Institute, part of Turkey's Justice Ministry.

Narin was killed on August 21, the day she went missing, and there was no evidence of poisoning, Mr Eren said.

He said forensic doctors were unable to determine if she had been subjected to sexual assault. An animal appeared to have bitten her left leg below the knee after she was killed, causing part of the limb to detach from her body. Some of her teeth were also found loose in the sack in which her body was found.

Narin’s murder provoked widespread anger in Turkey, where rights groups say at least 14 girls have been killed this year, nine of them with their mothers. Campaigners say authorities are failing to protect women and children from violence, often at the hands of male relatives.

Authorities detained about two dozen people in connection with Narin's death, including her parents and members of her extended family. Her father, local car dealer Arif Guran, was released last week after questioning, but her mother and brother were arrested on suspicion of complicity in deliberate murder.

They are among 12 people currently under formal arrest and investigation by the Diyarbakir prosecutor’s office in connection with the murder, Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc said on Monday.

One of them, an uncle of Narin called Salim Guran, was arrested on September 2 on suspicion of premeditated murder and deprivation of liberty after the girl’s DNA was found in his car. His associate, Nevzat Bahtiyar, was arrested on suspicion of the same crimes and confessed to hiding Narin’s body in the Egertutmaz stream, near the family's home in Tavsantepe. The region is a relatively poor and conservative part of south-eastern Turkey, where most residents are from the Kurdish ethnic minority.

On Sunday, Turkey’s Scientific and Technological Research Council was handed camera footage obtained from houses in Tavsantepe, which may lead to more information about the murder, Mr Tunc said at a forensic medicine conference in the Turkish city of Antalya.

Turkish authorities have criticised journalists and social media users for widespread commentary and speculation on the murder investigation, which has dominated local channels in the country.

“For the sake of the investigation, it is necessary to avoid issues that may lead to different interpretations,” Mr Tunc said. “Therefore, the murderers of our delicate girl, our delicate child, will definitely be identified within the scope of the investigation and brought before the judiciary. It will not take too long and as a result of a trial to be opened in this sense, her killer or killers will be held accountable before the judiciary, before the nation.”