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Kyrgyz Murder Suspect Confessed to Killing Women in 2011 and 2014, Interior Ministry Says

Kumarbek Abdyrov, held over the September killing of Aisuluu Mukasheva, 17, admitted older unsolved murders of women, the Interior Ministry said.

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Illustration: small interrogation room with table, two chairs and one-way mirror

In late September 2025, 17-year-old Aisuluu Mukasheva was killed in Kyrgyzstan's Issyk-Kul region, and a 41-year-old man with a criminal record was detained as a suspect. On October 15, the country's Ministry of Internal Affairs said that man, Kumarbek Abdyrov, had confessed to far more than her death. During interrogation, the ministry said, he admitted killing women in 2011 and 2014, crimes that had gone unsolved for more than a decade.

According to the ministry's account, Abdyrov took Mukasheva to an apple orchard near Azamat beach in the village of Zhenish, where at about 1 p.m. he assaulted and raped her, and then strangled her near the village of Kadzhi-Sai in the Ton district. The ministry confirmed that he confessed to her murder.

He then confessed to the 2014 killing of Kamila Duishebaeva, 19, the ministry said. Her body had been found that year in a cemetery in the village of Baitik, and an autopsy showed she had been strangled with a scarf. The case had never been solved. Abdyrov also claimed to have committed another violent murder three days after hers, and investigators said he pointed them to places where the bodies of earlier victims had been found.

The oldest case the ministry described went back to 2011. On March 14 of that year, police in the Sokuluk district were told that a woman's body had been found in a field along the road to the village of Kuntuu. She was born in 1989 and had been reported missing after leaving her home in Bishkek on February 12. She was eight months pregnant. A ministry representative said on the ElTR television channel that Abdyrov had confessed to raping and killing her.

The ministry said Abdyrov had multiple previous convictions, beginning with a robbery in 2006, and that he had also confessed to an attempted murder in 2015. It said he was suspected of acting with others and of using forged documents to hide his crimes, and it urged the public to rely only on official information as rumors about the case spread online.

These are confessions as described by Kyrgyzstan's Interior Ministry to the 24.kg news agency and on ElTR television on October 15, 2025; Abdyrov had not been tried for any of the killings at that time. The ministry identified the 2011 victim only by her initials, and the woman said to have been killed three days after Kamila Duishebaeva was not named. No ministry release could be opened directly.

Sources