A senior official from Meta Platforms has said it is impossible for the company to give Turkish authorities the deleted WhatsApp conversations of people under investigation over the killing of an 8-year-old girl since the chats are not stored, Deutsche Welle Turkish edition reported.
Joshua Breckman, head of communications at Meta, which owns WhatApp, denied Turkish media reports claiming that Meta was refusing to share data with Turkey that could shed light on the murder of Narin Güran, who was found dead in a sack left in a river on Sunday, 19 days after she went missing in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır.
Breckman said WhatsApp does not store the private conversations of people due to the encrypted nature of its messaging system, so it is impossible for the company to provide the Turkish authorities with any content it does not have.
When asked whether Meta shared data with law enforcement authorities in other countries as part of investigations, Breckman said it is impossible for the company to have access to any chat messages in any part of the world due to its privacy policy.
WhatsApp encrypts the communication channel between users with end-to-end encryption. The metadata of the user is encrypted as well when data is in motion on the communication channel between various parties.
The girl’s disappearance and murder sent shockwaves across the country, sparking protests and calls for justice.
Twenty-two people including members of Güran’s family —her parents, her eldest brother and several uncles — were detained following the discovery of her body.
Deleted WhatsApp messages
One of the uncles, Salim Güran, the mukhtar of the village of Tavşantepe, where Narin lived, was arrested last week on suspicion of murder and deprivation of liberty after DNA samples taken from his car matched DNA samples taken from the girl’s clothes.
Police found that all WhatsApp chats on Güran’s mobile phone had been deleted.
Media reports said Turkey sought assistance from Meta to help restore the suspect’s deleted WhatsApp messages, which would help solve the murder case.
Breckman said restoration of the deleted WhatsApp messages by the police is also impossible if they had not been backed up in Google Drive or iCloud.
Speculation abounds in Turkish media about the possible motive behind the murder of the little girl, but authorities have not yet made any statement and are awaiting the autopsy results, which will presumably reveal how and when the girl was murdered.
Meanwhile, Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya and Family Minister Mahinur Özdemir travelled to Tavşantepe on Wednesday.
The Interior Ministry announced the suspension the arrested mukhtar, Salim Güran, as the investigation into the murder continues.
Salim Güran’s lawyer, Seda Toğrul, also announced on Tuesday that she would no longer be representing the uncle in the wake of progress in the investigation, with statements from other suspects and secret witnesses pointing to the uncle’s role in the murder.
One of the villagers, Nevzat Bahtiyar, who was also arrested this week, told prosecutors that the mukhtar gave him the sack that contained Narin’s body and asked him to get rid of it and that he took the sack to the river.
He said in his testimony that the uncle offered him TL 200,000 (around $6,000) in return for his assistance in disposing of the corpse.
It was the first statement that pointed to the uncle’s role in the murder.
Narin was laid to rest on Monday in her village after an autopsy was conducted on Sunday at the Diyarbakır Council of Forensic Medicine.