On the afternoon of September 27, 2025, a 17-year-old schoolgirl named Aisuluu Mukasheva left home on the south shore of Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan to visit a friend. She never arrived. A security camera at a gas station at the entrance to the village of Barskoon recorded her getting into a car, a Honda Stream. Within two days police had found her body and detained the driver, a 41-year-old Bishkek man with previous convictions.
His name was Kumarbek Abdyrov. Two weeks later the Interior Ministry said he had confessed not only to her killing but to the deaths of three other young women, one in 2011 and two in March 2014, cases that had gone unsolved for more than a decade. One of them was Kamila Duishebaeva, a 19-year-old student whose death had become one of the most argued-over criminal cases in the country. The ministry also said that he had been convicted in 2016 of trying to kill a young woman, and that a court had cut his sentence so far that he was free again by 2018.
Abdyrov was never tried. He was found hanged in his cell in Bishkek's main pretrial detention center on February 7, 2026. What is known about the older killings comes from his confessions as the police described them, and from a television report the ministry's officers took part in. None of it was tested in court. This page sets out what the official sources and the Kyrgyz press reported, and keeps the charged case, the confessions and the claims of others apart.
Very little is on the public record about Abdyrov's life. Official releases identify him as A.K.K., born in 1984. In its first statements the Interior Ministry called him a resident of Bishkek; a later 24.kg report described him as a resident of the Chui region, which surrounds the capital.
According to Kaktus.media's February 2026 summary of the case, he had a mother, a wife and four children. He had spent several years working in Russia as a labor migrant, and in Bishkek he worked as a taxi driver. The Kyrgyz press later called him the "Bishkek maniac," a nickname that 24.kg says took hold on social media after the October 2025 television report.
His mother spoke publicly once. In a video published by Serep.TV in early October 2025, a woman who identified herself as his mother offered her sympathy to Aisuluu's family. "We found out what happened, there are no words," she said. "My heart aches. I have no choice but to agree with the girl's parents, who are demanding the highest measure of punishment."
The Interior Ministry's account of his history begins in 2006 in Kok-Zhar, a residential district of Bishkek. Abdyrov was then a 22-year-old student. According to the ministry, he hit a young woman who was walking down the street with her mother, using a piece of iron wrapped in newspaper, took her phone and ran. He was caught. The ministry said he was let go after he apologized to the victims and paid 5,000 som in damages.
Kyrgyzstan's Supreme Court, which released his record after his 2025 arrest, describes the case differently: it says the Oktyabrsky district court of Bishkek convicted him of fraud in 2006 and fined him 5,000 som. The October 2025 television report also said a court fined him 5,000 som.
Years later the woman he attacked said she regretted agreeing to a settlement. "Relatives asked me to forgive him, they said he was an only son," she said in the television report. "If I had known what he would do later, I would not have agreed." The Russian broadcaster RTVI reported that, according to her, his relatives had told her he was the only son of a single mother.
The oldest killing the ministry linked to Abdyrov is that of a young woman from Bishkek, identified only by her initials, A.Zh.Zh., and her year of birth, 1989. She left her home in Bishkek on February 12, 2011, and did not come back, and she was listed as missing. She was eight months pregnant.
At 4:30 p.m. on March 14, 2011, the police department of the Sokuluk district, west of Bishkek, received a report that a young woman's body had been found in a field beside the road to the village of Kuntuu. It was her. According to the ministry, investigators established at the time that she had been raped and then killed. The case was not solved.
On October 15, 2025, a ministry representative said on the state television channel ElTR that Abdyrov had confessed to raping and killing her. The ElTR report, as retold by Kaktus.media, placed the field near the village of Orok and gave her age as 22. The press has not published her name, and no family member is quoted in the sources found.
Kamila Duishebaeva was a 19-year-old student in Bishkek. On March 10, 2014, she disappeared. Her sister later said Kamila had been planning to meet her fiance at a cafe, but the meeting did not happen. Her grandfather filed the missing person report, and her family put up notices all over the city.
On March 16, 2014, local residents found her body in a cemetery on the edge of the village of Baitik, just south of Bishkek. She had been strangled with her own scarf. (One 24.kg report gives the place as a roadside in the Alamedin district; most reports, including the ministry's 2025 statement to 24.kg, say the cemetery in Baitik.)
Her death set off years of public argument. The police named Kalybek Eltuibasov, also known as Kalybek Salyanov, a relative of the then Prosecutor General Aida Salyanova, as a person of interest: Kamila's friend said Kamila had called a man named Kalyi on March 9, the day before she went missing, and the press variously described him as Salyanova's uncle or brother. Police later said that on the day she disappeared he had been at a sauna with a friend and two young women, and that video from the sauna's cameras had been deleted. He denied any involvement. His status in the case was that of a witness; he was never charged in her death.
At 11:37 p.m. on March 13, 2014, three days after Kamila Duishebaeva disappeared, the body of a young woman was found in a residential district on Razzakov Street in Bishkek. When officers arrived they found a bag over her head and her hands tied. Forensic examination showed that she had been raped and then strangled. She was 22. The ministry has identified her only by her initials, M.S.N.
No one was charged at the time. In October 2025 the ministry said Abdyrov had confessed to this killing and had shown investigators the place where it happened. The 24.kg English service reported his statement that he had committed "another violent murder three days after" Kamila's death, and that he had pointed investigators to places where bodies of earlier victims had been found.
The Duishebaeva case is the best documented of the older deaths, because it stayed in the news for more than a decade. Kaktus.media reconstructed its history in 2018 and again in October 2025.
In late March 2014 the head of the Interior Ministry's criminal investigation department, Maksat Abdykulov, promised that the crime would soon be solved. In April 2014 the interior minister, Abdylda Suranchiev, told parliament that Kamila's death was not a murder and said she had led a "frivolous lifestyle." He was widely criticized for the remark and was removed as minister in October 2014. His successor, Melis Turganbaev, set up a new investigative team. More than 500 people were questioned, and repeat forensic, criminalistic and biological examinations were ordered, with help from specialists from Malaysia. The case did not move.
A member of parliament, Shirin Aitmatova, found that Kamila's WhatsApp account had been accessed from her phone almost two months after her death, and that the account had disappeared in February 2015. In 2016 a new minister, Kashkar Junushaliev, promised to solve the case by the end of the year. In July 2017 police opened a case for obstruction of the investigation against Eltuibasov and a sauna owner, saying they had deleted the camera recordings, and put Eltuibasov on the wanted list. By then he had left Kyrgyzstan. Aida Salyanova said the questioning of her relative was the work of her political opponents.
In January 2019 the head of the criminal police, Nurbek Abdiev, told a ministry meeting that the man who had obstructed the investigation had been detained in the United States and that the case would be solved after he was brought back. "We know that the murder was domestic, there is no politics here," he said. Kaktus.media later reported that in July 2019 Eltuibasov and his family received political asylum in the United States. After 2019 there was no new official information. In 2018 Kamila's father said he believed the case would never be solved because people in power wanted it that way.
On October 10, 2025, Aida Salyanova wrote on Facebook that Kamila's murder had been solved, that it had been politicized to discredit her, and that it was connected to the death of Aisuluu Mukasheva. She announced a live broadcast and then postponed it, writing that the Interior Ministry had asked her to wait in the interests of the investigation. Five days later the ministry confirmed that Abdyrov had confessed to strangling Kamila Duishebaeva.
On October 13, 2015, according to the police, Abdyrov tried to kill another young woman, who was 21. She survived and described the attack in the 2025 ElTR report:
"He dragged me and threw me into an irrigation ditch. After 15 or 20 seconds he threw a big stone at me. He probably wanted to hit my head, but it hit my arm. He stood there, looked and left. I don't know how long I lay there, but it seemed like an eternity. I was afraid to move, afraid he would come back. After a while I climbed out of the canal, went out to the road, saw a gas station across the way and ran there. They helped me there and took me to the hospital."
According to the ElTR report as retold by Kaktus.media, he had raped her before throwing her into the canal. RTVI, summarizing the case in 2026, wrote that she lay still and pretended to be dead before she went for help. One survivor also told investigators that her attacker had asked her, "How did you manage to untie yourself? No one before you could." According to the report, that remark made detectives suspect he had attacked other women before.
She went to the police, and Abdyrov was arrested.
On February 11, 2016, the Oktyabrsky district court of Bishkek found Abdyrov guilty of attempted murder and sentenced him to 12 years in prison. On May 12, 2016, a criminal panel of the Bishkek City Court changed the legal description of the crime. According to the Supreme Court's summary, it reclassified his acts as robbery with unintentional grave bodily harm and kidnapping with unlawful deprivation of liberty, and set a combined sentence of seven years with confiscation of property.
Sources differ on how he got out. The Interior Ministry and 24.kg say he was released on parole in 2018; the ElTR report, Kaktus.media and RTVI say he was freed early under an amnesty in 2018; the Supreme Court's 2025 summary says he served his sentence in full. In November 2025 the ministry said "the criminal was free three years later and continued his criminal activity." RTVI reported that the judges who reduced his sentence were dismissed in 2020 in an anti-corruption review.
Aisuluu Mukasheva was 17, born in 2008, and in the eleventh grade. Her family lived in the Jeti-Oguz district on the southern shore of Issyk-Kul; reports place her home in Barskoon or in the regional center, Karakol. Her aunt, Umut, told the Kazakh outlet Caravan Info (as quoted by the Russian site NEWS.ru) that she was kind and hardworking, and that she wanted to enter the Interior Ministry's academy after school and become a prosecutor. "She used to say: 'Auntie, after the eleventh grade I will enter the Interior Ministry academy. In the future I will become a prosecutor.' She wanted to be a strong prosecutor," her aunt said. "She did not have time to reach her high goals."
Kaktus.media reported that she had never known the man who picked her up.
The accounts of her last day differ in detail, and some of the differences are noted here.
According to the Interior Ministry's first release, at about 12:30 p.m. Aisuluu left home, saying she was going to visit a friend. Her brother told Kaktus.media that she left the family's home in Barskoon at midday to go to a friend in the village of Zhenish. At about 12:45 p.m. a camera at a gas station at the entrance to Barskoon recorded her getting into a Honda Stream. The ministry said the driver was Abdyrov.
The ministry's account, as reported by 24.kg, is that he drove her to an apple orchard south of Azamat beach in Zhenish, where at about 1 p.m. he raped her, and that he then strangled her near a pond east of the village of Kadzhi-Sai in the Ton district, further west along the lake. The October ElTR report gave a fuller sequence: he raped her in an apple orchard near the village of Darkhan, tied her hands, took her to an old house in Zhenish and raped her again, and at about 3:30 p.m., near Kadzhi-Sai, strangled her. He then threw her phone into the lake and hid her body in the Boom Gorge, the narrow pass that carries the road from Issyk-Kul toward Bishkek.
That evening her family began searching. The ministry says a relative reported her missing at about 8:30 p.m. to the Jeti-Oguz district police; the ElTR report says her sister went to the police at about 6 p.m. Her brother said the family went through every video recording they could find along the village road and noticed an unfamiliar Honda Stream: she had passed, then the car had passed, and she was not seen again. Her aunt said villagers searched on horseback where cars could not go, along the shore, in the water, in the forest and in the fields, and complained that the authorities did not help until senior officials of the emergency ministry, the prosecutor's office and the police stepped in.
Police put the area under a "Perekhvat" (intercept) plan to find the car. According to the ministry, Abdyrov had tried to cover his tracks: he washed and abandoned the car and got rid of the phone and SIM card. Officers of the ministry's Main Criminal Investigation Department and the Jeti-Oguz district police detained him in a residential district of Bishkek, where, the ministry said, he had tried to hide. The ElTR report said the car was picked up by the cameras of the "Safe City" system, that he confessed at once and that he showed officers where he had left her body.
On September 29, the regional police said, investigators established that she had been raped and killed. Her body was found at the 14th kilometer of the Zhel-Aryk road in the Kemin district of the Chui region, in the Boom Gorge area. The Jeti-Oguz district police opened a criminal case for murder under Article 122 of the Criminal Code. Her brother told Kaktus.media that the police had told him the suspect first buried her on the lakeshore, sold her phone in Bishkek, then came back, dug up the body and drove it to the gorge. That version came from the family and was not repeated in the ministry's releases.
Two side disputes followed. A young man, Syimyk Narynbek uulu, told the outlet Serep TV that the family had been told police would not start searching until three days after she disappeared. The ministry said the statement was false, said he was not a relative, and detained him for spreading disinformation. Her family said he was their son-in-law and had spoken at their request; he was released. The ministry also opened an internal review of the officer who was said to have spoken to the family that way, calling such words "unacceptable."
Aisuluu was buried in her village on September 30, 2025. On October 1, several hundred people gathered in Barskoon, met police officials and local leaders, and demanded that the president add the death penalty to the law for the rape of children. "Prison will not reform them," their appeal said.
On October 15, 2025, the Interior Ministry confirmed to 24.kg that Abdyrov had confessed to Aisuluu's killing during interrogation, and then to older crimes, including the strangling of Kamila Duishebaeva in 2014. The same day ElTR broadcast a special report in which ministry officers described his history. The president's press secretary, Daiyrbek Orunbekov, shared it on social media. Kaktus.media later noted that the channel had been given access to police operational footage, film of his meetings with relatives and other case materials normally available only to investigators.
According to the ministry and the report, he confessed to the killings of A.Zh.Zh. in 2011, Kamila Duishebaeva and M.S.N. in March 2014, and Aisuluu Mukasheva in 2025, and to the 2015 attempted killing. He also told investigators he had raped another young woman in a field and let her go; the police found no case registered for that period and said the victim may never have reported it. Officers said all of his victims were young women aged 18 to 25 (Aisuluu was 17), that he picked them up while posing as a taxi driver, and that the attacks took place mostly in mountain areas and on the edges of towns. The ministry said he was suspected of acting together with others and of using forged documents to hide his crimes; it gave no details. It said he might be linked to at least six attacks on women, four of which ended in death, and that there could be more victims. Kaktus.media's monthly review in November put the count at seven crimes: four women raped and killed, two who survived, and one whose fate was unknown.
During the investigation, the ministry said, he asked to meet his mother and his wife so that he could tell them himself before the press did. ElTR broadcast part of the meeting. "I must bear the punishment to be cleansed," he told them. "The blood will not let go. I want you to know everything from me."
Abdyrov was held first in the temporary holding facility of the Jeti-Oguz district police and later in the holding facility of the Bishkek city police. He was arrested on a charge of murder under items 3, 5, 7 and 14 of Part 2 of Article 122 of the Criminal Code; the reports do not set out what each item covers. Courts extended his detention several times. Informburo.kz reported an extension on January 26, 2026, and the prison service said the last one ran to March 29, 2026. On December 17, 2025, he was moved to pretrial detention center No. 21 (SIZO-1) in Bishkek.
No source found reports a separate charge for the 2011 or 2014 deaths, an indictment sent to court, or a trial date.
On the evening of February 7, 2026, 24.kg and Kaktus.media reported, citing sources, that Abdyrov had been found dead in SIZO-1. The State Penitentiary Service at first declined to comment and then confirmed the death.
Its statement said that at about 12:30 p.m. on February 7 the accused A.K.K. was found hanging from the inner barred door of his cell, using his own trousers, and that he died at the scene despite first aid from staff. An investigative team from the penitentiary service and prosecutors who supervise prisons went to the scene. The death was registered, forensic examinations were ordered and a pre-investigation inquiry began. The preliminary version was suicide.
On February 10, 2026, Kaktus.media wrote that the Interior Ministry had not announced the outcome of the case, and noted that criminal cases are usually closed when the suspect or accused dies, because a dead person cannot be held criminally responsible.
The ministry's account of the 2016 appeal led to a separate prosecution. In November 2025 it said that the chain of crimes "could have been broken back in 2015," when his guilt for the attempted murder of a 21-year-old woman had been "fully proven," and that three judges of the Bishkek City Court, through the mediation of a prosecutor and a defense lawyer, had reduced his sentence in violation of the Code of Criminal Procedure. It said Abdyrov and his close relatives had given statements describing a corruption scheme that let him avoid a just punishment.
The lawyer was detained. On November 21, 2025, the Council of Judges agreed to the Prosecutor General's request to prosecute the three former judges. The three former judges were charged with corruption and with issuing an unjust court ruling, and the prosecutor with corruption, and on November 25 the Pervomaisky district court of Bishkek ordered all of them held in custody. One of the judges, Saniya Branchaeva, who has diabetes, was taken to the hospital; her daughter said her condition was critical.
On May 22, 2026, after a hearing of about six hours broadcast on the Supreme Court's YouTube channel, the Pervomaisky district court, with Judge Tilek Turdukulov presiding, gave its verdict. Former judges Saniya Branchaeva, Kaisyn Abakirov and Zhanyl Mambetaly were found guilty of knowingly issuing an unjust ruling. Former prosecutor Dilyarom Mambetova was found guilty of exceeding her official powers. Former lawyer Sagyn Dzhunusov was found guilty of fraud. In each case the court imposed no punishment because the statute of limitations had run out; a forgery charge against Dzhunusov had already been dropped on April 24 for the same reason. They were released from custody in the courtroom under a written undertaking not to leave, pending the verdict's entry into force. The report does not mention a conviction for corruption.
Aisuluu's death led to a national argument over capital punishment. Kyrgyzstan abolished the death penalty in 2007 and in 2010 ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which aims at its abolition; the last execution took place in 1998.
On October 1, 2025, President Sadyr Japarov's press secretary, Askat Alagozov, said the case was under the president's personal control and that the president had ordered his legal department to draft laws providing the death penalty for the rape of children and for rape combined with the murder of women. On October 13 the presidential administration published a draft constitutional amendment for public discussion. It would have allowed the death penalty "only for the rape of children and murder combined with rape," and withdrawn the country from the Second Optional Protocol. Its explanatory note cited Prosecutor General's Office figures: 43 killings of women and children in 2024 and 28 in the first eight months of 2025, and 107 rapes in 2024, 88 of them of minors.
A group of international human rights organizations condemned the proposal in mid-October. The ombudsman, Jamilya Jamanbaeva, said at the end of October that the death penalty would not solve the problem and that the country needed better investigations and punishment that could not be avoided; UN representatives backed her. On December 10, 2025, the Constitutional Court ruled that restoring the death penalty by constitutional amendment was inconsistent with the constitution, inadmissible and legally impossible, because the protocol has no withdrawal mechanism, and that the draft could not be put to a referendum.
Charged: the killing of Aisuluu Mukasheva. The evidence described publicly is the gas station recording, the car, his confession and his showing police the body. He was never tried, so there is no court finding.
Confessed, according to the Interior Ministry: the killings of A.Zh.Zh. (2011), Kamila Duishebaeva and M.S.N. (both March 2014), one rape that was never reported, and the 2015 attack. These confessions were described by the police and in a television report made with their cooperation. No court tested them, and no physical evidence linking him to the older deaths has been made public.
Convicted: the 2015 attack, under the reduced 2016 appeal ruling (robbery with unintentional grave harm, and kidnapping). The ministry's claim that he raped that woman is not part of the published court record. The ministry's description of the 2006 incident as a robbery differs from the Supreme Court's record of a fraud conviction.
Unproven: the ministry's statement that he acted together with others and used forged documents; the estimates of six or seven attacks; the suggestion that there were more victims.
The Duishebaeva case: years of official suspicion fell on Kalybek Eltuibasov, who was only ever a witness in the murder case. The obstruction case against him and the 2019 statement that he was detained in the United States were never resolved in any published court ruling.
Kumarbek Abdyrov died in custody on February 7, 2026, as an accused man, without a trial or a verdict on any killing. As of the May 22, 2026 Kaktus.media report, which records his death, no outcome of the criminal case against him had been reported; the result of the forensic examinations and the prison inquiry into his death had also not been published in the sources found. The first-instance verdict against the three former judges, the former prosecutor and the former lawyer had not yet entered into force at the time of that report.
1984: Kumarbek Abdyrov is born.
2006: In Kok-Zhar, Bishkek, a young woman is struck with an iron object and her phone is taken; the case ends with a 5,000 som payment or fine.
February 12, 2011: A.Zh.Zh., eight months pregnant, leaves home in Bishkek and goes missing.
March 14, 2011: Her body is found in a field on the road to Kuntuu, Sokuluk district.
March 10, 2014: Kamila Duishebaeva, 19, disappears in Bishkek.
March 13, 2014: M.S.N., 22, is found on Razzakov Street, Bishkek.
March 16, 2014: Kamila Duishebaeva is found in a cemetery in Baitik.
October 13, 2015: A 21-year-old woman survives an attack; Abdyrov is arrested.
February 11, 2016: The Oktyabrsky district court sentences him to 12 years for attempted murder.
May 12, 2016: The Bishkek City Court reclassifies the crimes and reduces the sentence to seven years.
2018: He is released (parole or amnesty, by different accounts).
July 2019: Kalybek Eltuibasov and his family receive asylum in the United States, according to Kaktus.media.
September 27, 2025: Aisuluu Mukasheva, 17, is recorded getting into a Honda Stream at Barskoon and disappears.
September 29, 2025 (by): Abdyrov is detained in Bishkek; her body is found in the Kemin district.
September 30, 2025: Aisuluu is buried in her village.
October 1, 2025: President Japarov orders draft death penalty laws; residents rally in Barskoon.
October 10, 2025: Aida Salyanova says the Duishebaeva case is solved.
October 15, 2025: The Interior Ministry and ElTR report his confessions to the 2011 and 2014 killings.
November 21-25, 2025: Former judges are cleared for prosecution, charged and taken into custody.
December 10, 2025: The Constitutional Court rules the death penalty cannot be restored.
December 17, 2025: Abdyrov is moved to SIZO-1.
February 7, 2026: He is found hanged in his cell.
May 22, 2026: The former judges, prosecutor and lawyer are found guilty without punishment because the limitation period has expired.