For two years the killings were a rumor in Tashkent. Women had been found strangled, the city was frightened, and the authorities said nothing. Then, on February 26, 2014, the Uzbek prosecutor Azizbek Nazarov confirmed that a court had sentenced two Uzbek citizens, Abduseit Ormanov and Polatbay Berdaliyev, whose name was also reported as Polat Pardaliev, to life imprisonment for robbing, raping and killing seven women in Uzbekistan and four in neighboring Kazakhstan between 2011 and 2012.
Nazarov set out the case in a long article on the judicial news site Huquq under the title Death Machine, the first official account of the crimes. The method, he wrote, was the same every time. The men drove a Mercedes-Benz 180-C and offered women taxi rides, took them to deserted places, raped them, strangled them and took their money and valuables. The killings ran across the border between the Tashkent region and the area around Shymkent in southern Kazakhstan.
Ormanov and Berdaliyev had been friends since their school years. Berdaliyev, born in 1986, had served part of a six-year sentence for robbery in Kazakhstan before his parole in 2010. The two were detained in May 2012. Both are reported to have been sentenced to life in Kazakhstan as well as in Uzbekistan, and two further men said to have belonged to the group have not been caught.
Uzbek courts do not publish their judgments, and the prosecutor's article is the fullest public statement of the evidence. The women have not been named in any official source.