Nikolai Dzhumagaliev has spent most of his adult life in psychiatric custody, and no court has ever convicted him of a killing. Between January 1979 and December 1980 a series of women were killed in and around Uzynagash, a large village west of Alma-Ata (now Almaty) in what was then the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic. Dzhumagaliev, a local firefighter, was arrested in December 1980 and confessed. Psychiatrists in Moscow diagnosed schizophrenia, and on December 3, 1981, a court found him insane and sent him for compulsory treatment in a closed special hospital. He escaped in 1989, was caught again in Uzbekistan in 1991, and has been held since then at Kazakhstan's specialized psychiatric hospital in the village of Aktas, near Almaty. In 2014 police in the western city of Aktobe said he had also killed a student there in 1990, while he was at large. Kazakh news outlets credit him with ten victims; his legal record, as reported, contains findings of insanity, not convictions.
Information about the case was long kept from the public, NewTimes.kz wrote in 2025. Kazakh and Russian journalists, former investigators, hospital staff and the police have since described it; their accounts agree on the outline and differ on many details.
Dzhumagaliev was born in 1952 in Uzynagash (often written Uzun-Agach in Russian), in the Almaty region. The Czech daily Deník, in a 2020 profile, gives his birth date as November 15, 1952; the Moscow television channel 360 gives November 1952. His father was Kazakh and his mother Belarusian, according to both. He grew up as the only son in a family of four children, with three sisters. Deník says he was the third child.
At school he is described as an average pupil, quiet and not aggressive (Vechernyaya Moskva, 2025; NewTimes.kz, 2025). According to 360, after eight grades he enrolled at the same time in an evening school and a railway vocational school in Alma-Ata, worked briefly in Atyrau, and in 1970 was called up for military service in the chemical defense troops. Deník places that service in Samarkand and Otar; other accounts mention only Samarkand.
After the army, 360 reports, he worked as an electrician in his home village, failed a driving course, and failed the entrance examinations for the geology faculty of Kazakh State University. He then spent several years in seasonal and short-term work far from home: as a sailor, a freight forwarder or loader, a bulldozer driver and an electrician, in Karaganda, the Urals, Siberia and the Arctic. Deník lists the Urals, Siberia and Murmansk; NewTimes.kz and Vechernyaya Moskva describe him traveling "from Murmansk to Magadan."
Several accounts link the start of the killings to his private life in these years. Deník and 360 say he caught venereal diseases from short-lived partners in 1977, and 360 and Vechernyaya Moskva add an unrequited love affair. A private detective quoted by NewTimes.kz in 2025, Maxim Zabolotny, said that after the infection he came to regard women as unclean. A psychologist who has worked at his hospital since 2007, Akmaral Shegentaikyzy, told the Kazakh outlet Caravan in 2023 that she knew of no evidence for the story that a girlfriend's betrayal set him off, and that fixed ideas of "cleansing the world" are common in some people with schizophrenia. These are explanations offered after the fact; none was tested in court.
In 1977 he returned to Uzynagash and joined the local fire service (360; Deník; NewTimes.kz, April 2026). Accounts say he became interested in occult ideas at about this time. According to 360 and Vechernyaya Moskva, he later told investigators that his grandfather had left him books on the subject and that his family descended from Genghis Khan. Zakon.kz in 2014 also reported his claim of descent from Genghis Khan. 360 frames all of this as his own claims.
His nickname, "Iron Fang" (Zhelezny Klyk in Russian, Temir Azu in the Kazakh press), came from the metal crowns on his teeth, according to 360 and Vechernyaya Moskva. English-language retellings often render it "Metal Fang."
The first killing attributed to him took place in January 1979. Informburo, Tengrinews, 360 and Vechernyaya Moskva all describe the victim as a young woman who belonged to a Seventh-day Adventist congregation and was walking home from a church gathering near the road between Uzynagash and Maibulak. Deník, by contrast, says she was walking home from a shift at a factory. She was found dead days later near Fabrichny, a settlement close to Uzynagash; Deník gives the date as January 25.
A criminal case was opened, but no one was caught (Informburo, 2016). According to 360 and Vechernyaya Moskva, suspicion first fell on the young woman's fiancé and on members of her congregation, who were able to show where they had been. No one was charged.
Informburo, summarizing the case in 2016, wrote that he committed five more killings in 1979, all of women. Vechernyaya Moskva says six women were found dead near Almaty that year. 360 gives a sequence that it attributes to him: an older woman found dead in April 1979, a mother and her daughter killed in the village that summer, and a woman killed later that year.
On August 21, 1979, while drunk, Dzhumagaliev shot a fellow firefighter dead and was detained (Informburo; Deník). 360 gives two versions of what happened: in one, the two men argued; in the other, he was showing off a rifle and it went off. Vechernyaya Moskva describes it as an accidental shot while he was showing off the gun.
The police treated the death as an accident, 360 reports, and a superficial search of his home turned up nothing that linked him to the earlier killings. He was sent to the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, the Soviet Union's leading center for forensic psychiatry, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia (Informburo; Deník; 360). The outcome was compulsory psychiatric treatment. 360 writes that the killing was ruled an accident and that the treatment was set at four and a half years; it does not name a court or a charge. All the accounts agree that he was released in less than a year, and Vechernyaya Moskva says the release was for good behavior.
He returned to Uzynagash and, according to Informburo and Deník, killed three more women. 360 places one of these killings in November 1980, after a woman had been with him at his home.
The series ended at a gathering in his home in December 1980. A woman who had been at the party was killed, and guests raised the alarm, according to Informburo and Deník. 360 says accounts differ on how the guests learned what had happened. The police arrived, and in the confusion he fled into the hills (Informburo; Deník). Vechernyaya Moskva dates the killing at the party to December 18, 1980.
He was arrested on December 19, 1980, at the home of a relative, where he had been hiding (Informburo; Deník). 360 says he was found hiding in a woman's house. The evidence against him, 360 reports, included witness statements and physical evidence from his home.
In custody he talked. 360 reports that he confessed to seven of the nine killings in the case.
The question of his sanity was contested. Vechernyaya Moskva writes that psychiatrists in Kazakhstan found him sane, and that investigators then sent him to Moscow, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The hospital psychologist quoted by Caravan in 2023 said that his answers to investigators seemed reasonable at first, so illness was not suspected, and that the diagnosis was later confirmed by independent specialists from Russia.
On December 3, 1981, a court again found him insane and ordered compulsory treatment in a closed special psychiatric hospital (Informburo, 2016; Deník, 2020). Zakon.kz, in 2014, wrote that he was tried in 1981 and sent to compulsory treatment in Tashkent, the capital of the Uzbek Soviet republic, and that he had been "found not subject to criminal punishment." NewTimes.kz, in August 2026, put it the same way: the court found him insane and ordered compulsory treatment.
Other descriptions of the ruling differ. 360 writes that he was found guilty of nine killings but declared insane. The Kazakh business paper Kursiv wrote in 2026 that he was found guilty and that his prison sentence was replaced with compulsory treatment. Tengrinews, in a January 2016 report, said he had been "sentenced to life imprisonment," which no other account supports. The hospital psychologist told Caravan in 2023 that people in his position are not tried in the ordinary way but are placed in psychiatric care. Informburo, Deník, Zakon.kz and NewTimes.kz all describe a finding of insanity followed by compulsory treatment, not a prison term.
He spent about eight years in the special hospital (Informburo; Deník; 360). 360 says he attempted suicide there twice and that staff described him as polite. After about eight years, according to 360 and Vechernyaya Moskva, doctors judged that his condition had improved and that he no longer posed a danger, and he was to be moved to an ordinary psychiatric hospital.
On August 29, 1989, he escaped during that transfer (Informburo; Deník; 360). Informburo says he got away from the vehicle taking him to the ordinary hospital; Deník says he jumped from it. 360 gives a different setting: escorted by a nurse and an orderly, he was taken to the airport in Frunze (now Bishkek), the capital of Soviet Kyrgyzstan, and slipped away there.
The search that followed was large. 360 reports that militia, soldiers and hang-glider pilots combed the mountains; Deník mentions gliders and light aircraft. Neither found him.
According to Deník and 360, he hid in the mountains for much of the next two years, mainly in Kyrgyzstan and the Alatau range, gathering medicinal plants and trading them for food. He also asked an acquaintance who was traveling to Moscow to mail a letter for him, which pointed the search toward the Soviet capital. 360 says he had the letter sent without a stamp so that it would be noticed, and that Moscow detectives identified the sender through a handwriting examination. Vechernyaya Moskva says the letter, addressed to another friend, hinted that he would kill more women, and that police searched Moscow while he was in the Kazakh mountains.
In 1990, according to 360 and Vechernyaya Moskva, a young woman was killed in a house in Aktyubinsk (now Aktobe), in western Kazakhstan, and a passerby or neighbor who saw the killer was threatened and let him go. In 2014 police in Aktobe announced that they attributed a 1990 killing of a student in the city to him; no court has ruled on it.
In 1991 he was detained in the Fergana region of Uzbekistan after stealing a sheep (Deník; Zakon.kz; 360). Deník dates the arrest to April 1991 and 360 to the spring; Kursiv, in 2026, wrote that he was caught in the Fergana Valley in January 1991. He gave a false identity and claimed to be Chinese, hoping, according to 360, for a light sentence as an escaped foreigner. 360 says his inability to explain how he had crossed the border gave him away and that a detective who had searched for him recognized him. Deník names the man who identified him as the criminologist Yuri Dubyagin, who had taken part in the 1980 arrest. 360 adds that he told his captors that hawthorn, mountain herbs and apples had cured him.
He was returned to psychiatric custody.
Since 1991 he has been held at the Republican psychiatric hospital of a special type in Aktas, a village in the Almaty region about 40 kilometers from central Almaty (Kursiv, 2026; Tengrinews, 2016). NewTimes.kz describes it as the only specialized institution of its kind in Kazakhstan, and the Ministry of Health has said that more than 80 percent of its patients committed serious or especially serious crimes against people (Kursiv; NewTimes.kz, 2026). It is surrounded by a concrete wall and barbed wire; staff enter only with passes, and medical staff leave their phones at the gate (Tengrinews, January 6, 2016).
Accounts of his life there are consistent. Informburo reported in 2016 that he repaired small appliances. 360 says he played chess and gave interviews to journalists. Tengrinews reported in 2014 that he had attempted suicide several times and wrote regularly to the authorities asking to be executed; Vechernyaya Moskva and 360 also report a request for the death penalty, which 360 says doctors saw as a worsening of his condition that later passed.
His doctors have more than once considered whether he could be released. In September 2014 Zakon.kz quoted the clinic's assessment that his "behavior is orderly" and that "the patient is calm," and reported that the question of his discharge was open; specialists who study serial killers strongly disagreed, it said. Tengrinews reported the same month that some doctors said he was no longer dangerous. 360 writes that doctors at one point considered outpatient observation but that the security services blocked his release.
In August 2023 Caravan published an interview with Akmaral Shegentaikyzy, the psychologist who has worked at the Aktas hospital since 2007. She called him the hospital's "most exemplary patient," said his condition was stable and that he spoke little, and said he did not accept his diagnosis and believed he had been locked up on a fabricated case. She thought it unlikely that he would ever be released, said staff were careful not to provoke him, and said she had heard that an older sister visited him and brought food. She also gave a far higher count of deaths than any other account.
On September 18, 2014, Tengrinews and Zakon.kz, both citing the Aktobe outlet Aktobe Times, reported that police in Aktobe had reopened a criminal case into the 1990 killing of a young female student in the city and had linked it to Dzhumagaliev. According to these reports, the woman had come from a village to study in Aktobe and rented part of a private house. Investigators reviewing old files were struck by the resemblance between her injuries and those in his earlier cases. That summer, an undercover officer placed with him at the hospital posed as a friend, and Dzhumagaliev described the killing to him. Police said the case raised the number of victims attributed to him to ten, and that his killings spanned 1979 to 1991 in Kazakhstan and Russia.
The 2014 reports do not describe a charge, a trial or a verdict. Zakon.kz's headline said he had been "found guilty" of another killing, but the article itself describes a reopened case and investigators "working on" him. In January 2016, Tengrinews and Informburo wrote that he had been charged with the Aktobe killing in September 2014. The Aktobe killing therefore stands as a killing attributed to him by police, not one a court has decided.
On January 5, 2016, messages began spreading on WhatsApp and then Facebook and VKontakte claiming that he had escaped from the Aktas hospital on December 23 and had been seen near the Green Bazaar in central Almaty (Tengrinews; Informburo). The next day the police of the Almaty region called the claims disinformation. The police said he had not escaped from the psychiatric hospital in the village of Aktas, Informburo reported. The regional police told Tengrinews that similar false rumors surfaced every year and that there was no search order for him.
A Tengrinews reporter went to the hospital. The duty doctor confirmed that he was there and being treated, refused to let him be seen, and said, "If he had escaped, we wouldn't be standing here like this." Staff leaving the building said he was in the hospital's second department, calm and not aggressive, eating and taking his medication, and that the hospital held about a thousand such patients. He was 63.
On January 8, 2016, the Almaty city police reported that the criminal police had traced the message to a 21-year-old woman from Uzynagash. She confirmed in her statements that the story was invented, her motive had not been established, and a pre-trial investigation was opened into the knowing spread of false information, an offense that the police said carried up to five years in prison (Tengrinews, January 8, 2016). The outcome of that investigation was not reported.
In 2019 the director Ruslan Pak, who lives and works in South Korea, shot a thriller in Almaty called Three (Tri), set in the 1980s, about a young police trainee who joins a special unit hunting a killer of women (Kazinform, 2022). It was the first co-production between Kazakhstan and South Korea, according to NewTimes.kz. The film competed in the New Currents section of the Busan International Film Festival in 2020, was shown at the Moscow International Film Festival, and opened in Kazakh cinemas on March 31, 2022 (Kazinform; Tengrinews; NewTimes.kz).
Accounts of the film's link to the case differ. Tengrinews and NewTimes.kz described it as a film about the capture of Dzhumagaliev, based on the director's interview with the investigator who led the case. Kazinform quoted Pak as saying the film was based on real events but was not dedicated to the killer, that its hero was fictional, and that he had turned down an offer to meet Dzhumagaliev. Pak said he had heard the story as a child and later met the man who had led the operation to catch him.
In July 2026 a video spread on social media showing a man who closely resembled Dzhumagaliev complaining to the Minister of Health, Akmaral Alnazarova, about conditions and the lack of order at the Aktas hospital (Kursiv, July 29, 2026). The ministry ordered an inspection by its Committee for Medical and Pharmaceutical Control, with prosecutors and the human rights ombudsman taking part, covering medical records, treatment, patients' conditions and their rights. "Every such appeal is considered a basis for a comprehensive and objective examination of the facts," the ministry's press service said.
A separate complaint followed. An anonymous Instagram post alleged that around 2008 patients in three wards had been restrained, punished with drugs and treated in degrading ways. On August 9, 2026, the ministry said its regional control department had inspected the hospital and that an inspection act dated August 7, 2026, had not confirmed the claims, and it warned that knowingly spreading false information could lead to legal liability (NewTimes.kz, August 9, 2026). The same report said Dzhumagaliev was held there under compulsory treatment and described his complaints in a YouTube interview about the lack of personal space, long stays in the wards, limited walks and poor living conditions.
As of August 9, 2026, Nikolai Dzhumagaliev was held under compulsory treatment at the specialized psychiatric hospital in Aktas, Almaty region (NewTimes.kz). He was 73 at the end of 2025, according to 360. NewTimes.kz wrote in April 2026 that he had been held at the hospital for 35 years. No court decision on his discharge has been reported.
The number of victims. Kazakh outlets since 2014 have credited him with ten victims, the figure the Aktobe police gave when they linked him to the 1990 killing (Tengrinews; Zakon.kz; NewTimes.kz). That count is an attribution, not a court finding. Informburo's 2016 summary counts six killings in 1979, the shooting, and three more after his release. 360 says the 1981 case covered nine killings, seven of which he confessed to. Zakon.kz wrote in 2014 that unofficial estimates were higher still, without giving a figure or a source. In 2023 the hospital psychologist told Caravan that official case records attributed 57 deaths to him and that the real number might be higher; no other account supports that figure, and it is not supported by any published record.
The 1979 shooting. Whether the firefighter's death was an accident or followed a quarrel is not settled in the reporting (360). The accounts describe a psychiatric diagnosis and compulsory treatment that ended within a year; none describes a criminal conviction or a prison term for the shooting.
The legal form of the 1981 ruling. Informburo, Deník, Zakon.kz and NewTimes.kz describe a finding of insanity and an order for compulsory treatment. 360 and Kursiv describe a finding of guilt followed by treatment in place of a prison sentence, and one 2016 Tengrinews report wrongly says he was sentenced to life imprisonment.
The arrest in December 1980. Informburo and Deník give December 19, 1980, at a relative's home; 360 places the final killing in November 1980. Vechernyaya Moskva dates the killing at the party to December 18.
The escape and recapture. Accounts differ on whether he escaped from a vehicle or at the Frunze airport, and on whether he was caught in January or April 1991.
The years since 1991. Kursiv says he has been at Aktas since his 1991 arrest, and NewTimes.kz in 2026 wrote that he had been there for 35 years; Informburo in 2016 said he had been held there "for over 15 years."
His motives. The accounts of occult beliefs, descent from Genghis Khan and hatred of women rest on his own statements as retold decades later, and on the views of a private detective; the hospital psychologist rejected one popular explanation outright.
The Aktobe killing. The police link rests, as reported, on a resemblance to his earlier cases and on what he told an undercover officer in a psychiatric hospital. No court has ruled on it.
1952: Born in Uzynagash, Almaty region, Kazakh SSR (November 15, per Deník).
1970: Called up for military service in the chemical defense troops (360).
1977: Returns to Uzynagash and joins the fire service.
January 1979: A young woman walking home near the Uzynagash to Maibulak road is killed; a criminal case is opened but no one is caught.
1979: Further killings of women in the area, including a mother and daughter in their home in the summer.
August 21, 1979: Shoots a fellow firefighter dead while drunk; detained, diagnosed with schizophrenia at the Serbsky Institute, sent for compulsory treatment.
1980: Released in under a year; returns to Uzynagash.
Late 1980: Three more women killed, according to Informburo and Deník.
December 1980: A woman is killed at a gathering in his home; he flees.
December 19, 1980: Arrested at a relative's home.
December 3, 1981: A court finds him insane and orders compulsory treatment in a closed special psychiatric hospital (Tashkent, per Zakon.kz).
August 29, 1989: Escapes during a transfer to an ordinary psychiatric hospital.
1990: A young woman is killed in Aktyubinsk (Aktobe); police later attribute the killing to him.
1991: Caught in the Fergana region of Uzbekistan after stealing a sheep; identified and returned to psychiatric custody (April per Deník; January per Kursiv).
1991 onward: Held at the specialized psychiatric hospital in Aktas, Almaty region.
Summer 2014: Describes the Aktobe killing to an undercover officer at the hospital.
September 18, 2014: Aktobe police are reported to have reopened the 1990 case and linked it to him.
January 5 and 6, 2016: A false report of his escape spreads; police and hospital staff deny it.
January 8, 2016: Police trace the rumor to a 21-year-old woman from Uzynagash; a pre-trial investigation is opened.
2019: The film Three is shot in Almaty.
March 31, 2022: Three opens in Kazakh cinemas.
August 2023: A hospital psychologist describes him to Caravan as the hospital's "most exemplary patient."
July 29, 2026: The Ministry of Health orders an inspection of the Aktas hospital after a video complaint by a man resembling him.
August 7 and 9, 2026: The ministry reports that an inspection did not confirm separate abuse claims; he is reported to be held there under compulsory treatment.