[thanatos_dem]

If he has signed into hotel WiFi and his fiancée was within range of that, the phone and watch would remained connected over the WiFi network.

WRT claims that they used his fingerprint to unlock the watch, that isn’t supported, but if it were within range of a paired phone and put on a wrist, it would unlock when the phone is unlocked, potentially via Touch ID.

Edit: If I were to speculate (which is all any of us can do) I would guess that the latter is how they got access to the watch, and he and his fiancé had a family iCloud account, which the files automatically uploaded to via his phone.

[bredren]

Unless I’m missing a setting, the watch doesn’t unlock without a pin. It locks when it loses contact with the wrist.

Also, are you suggesting WiFi from the hotel covered not only the front of but the depths of the embassy?

[thanatos_dem]

The setting is in the Watch app. It’s Passcode > Unlock with iPhone. It used to be pretty hit or miss, but with the new OSes it’s worked really consistently.

And I’m not really suggesting anything about the WiFi. I know remarkably little about the network infrastructure in foreign hotels and embassies. Just that there are mechanism in iOS that could feasibly make this possible, rather than immediately jumping to a Turkish surveillance cover up.

You know, Occam’s razor and all that jazz.