Relatives of Turkish girl Narin Guran go on trial for murder

Family members including eight-year-old's mother are suspected of intentional killing

Protesters hold portraits of Narin Guran in Istanbul, in September. AFP

A court in Turkey on Thursday began hearings in the trial of four people, including close relatives, charged with the murder of Narin Guran, an eight-year-old girl whose death in August shocked the nation.

Narin’s mother, Yuksel Guran, brother Enes, uncle Salim Guran, as well as a family acquaintance, Nevzat Bahtiyar, will appear before a judge in the south-eastern province of Diyarbakir, where search teams found the girl's body in a sack dumped in a stream not far from her home on September 8. She had disappeared nearly three weeks earlier after attending a Quran study session. A post-mortem found that she had been strangled the day she went missing.

The killing sparked outrage and protests across Turkey because of the alleged involvement of family members, delays in recovering her body and the mystery over the identities of the offenders.

The four accused face sentences known as aggravated life imprisonment, Turkey's state-run TRT reported, meaning they could spend the rest of their lives in prison as they would only be eligible for parole after serving 36 years. Under Turkish law, prisoners serving aggravated life imprisonment are to be kept in solitary confinement, with an hour of open-air or sports a day and infrequent communication with relatives.

Salim Guran, Narin’s uncle, was arrested on September 2 on suspicion of premeditated murder and deprivation of liberty after the girl’s DNA was found in his car. The family acquaintance, Mr Bahtiyar, was arrested on September 10 on suspicion of the same crimes and confessed to hiding Narin’s body in the Egertutmaz stream, near the family's home in Tavsantepe. Narin’s mother and brother were arrested three days later.

Diyarbakir is a relatively poor and conservative province in south-eastern Turkey, where most residents are from the Kurdish ethnic minority.

The Diyarbakir Eighth High Criminal Court ordered the “compulsory appearance” at the first hearing for Narin’s father, Arif Guran, who was arrested in September but later released. Twenty-one people have been ordered to attend as witnesses.

Activists from the group We Will Stop Femicide stood outside the courthouse as the trial began. The group issued a statement saying they would “obtain justice for Narin”.

Turkish rights groups say at least 18 girls have been killed this year, nine of them along with their mothers. Campaigners say authorities are failing to protect women and children from violence, often at the hands of male relatives.

The number of women killed and dying in suspicious circumstances in Turkey is rising, according to rights groups. Last month a 19-year-old man stabbed and beheaded two young women in Istanbul before taking his own life at the old city’s fifth-century stone walls. The incident came a week after a young policewoman was killed while on duty.