On the morning of March 5, 2011, Nasima Ishmuratova telephoned her family in Kazan. She was ninety, lived alone in an apartment on Batyrshina Street in the city's Kirovsky district, and had been to the bank. She told her relatives she was tired and asked them not to call her. When one daughter tried to reach her around noon, there was no answer. That evening another daughter, Alfiya, arrived with her own daughter and found the balcony door open and her mother's body under a blanket and a pillow.
Nasima Ishmuratova was the first of 31 women whom a Russian court later found Radik Tagirov had killed. Over the next nineteen months, by the court's finding, he went from one city to another along the Volga and into the Urals, entering the apartments of elderly women who lived alone, beating and strangling them, and leaving with what money he could find. The press called the unknown killer the "Volga maniac" because so many of the cities lay on or near the river. Investigators had his DNA and his shoe prints for years but no name to put to them. The killings stopped in the autumn of 2012. Tagirov was not detained until December 2020.
Radik Tagirovich Tagirov was a native of Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan. Reports at his arrest in December 2020 gave his age as 38, which places his birth around 1982. Neighbors described an ordinary household: his mother, who still worked at a chemical plant in 2020; his father, described as a security guard or a driver; his grandmother, who lived with them; and a sister. "He grew up in front of us, he never offended anyone," one neighbor told reporters after the arrest.
The fullest account of his early life comes from his own pretrial statements, which prosecutors had read aloud at his trial in November 2022. In them he described a two-parent home with a grandmother living in it, relations with the grandmother that were strained from about the age of eight, and drug use from 1998 to 2013. His lawyer later declined to comment on reports that his motive was revenge for a childhood in which his grandmother beat him. No published court ruling establishes any such motive.
He worked as a locksmith or plumber, according to the Investigative Committee and his lawyer. On April 28, 2009, the Sovetsky District Court of Kazan convicted him of theft. One report on his 2020 arrest also lists a conviction for illegal possession of weapons. He was released from prison in June 2010, according to that report; another account says he was released on parole from a colony. About a year of that 2009 sentence was still unserved, and in 2024 the court added it to his punishment.
In his closing statement at trial, Tagirov gave his own account of the years in question. In 2011, he said, he lived in Derbyshki, a district of Kazan, worked unofficially as a guard in gaming halls and as a broker arranging loans, and always had 4,000 to 5,000 rubles on him. The same year, he said, he carried "smoking mixtures," synthetic drugs, from Moscow to Kazan as a courier, earning 30,000 to 40,000 rubles a trip, until a traffic police stop in the autumn of 2011, when the cargo was not found, ended that work. In early 2012 he moved to Moscow, where he first slept in train stations and then handed out advertising cards near the Shchelkovskaya and VDNKh metro stations, including cards advertising the same drugs. He told the court he returned to Kazan only in 2018. There he lived with a woman who had a child, and they had a child together. By the time of his trial he described himself as having two children, a wife who worked without days off, and parents who were pensioners.
The Investigative Committee of Russia, which built the case, and the court that convicted Tagirov place the crimes between March 2011 and October 2012. The verdict covers fifteen cities: Kazan, Nizhnekamsk and Volzhsk in and next to Tatarstan; Izhevsk, Cheboksary, Nizhny Novgorod, Kirov and Ivanovo; Ufa, Perm, Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk to the east; Samara and Saratov down the Volga; and Moscow.
According to the Committee, the victims were women aged 75 to 90 who lived alone, most of them in five-story apartment blocks. Investigators said the man got inside by presenting himself as a utility worker, a gas worker, a social worker, an electrician or a plumber; one report says he claimed to have come to clean the ventilation shafts. In other cases he approached women outside shops or markets and offered to carry their bags home. "Sometimes they called me themselves, sometimes I'd invite myself," he said in the video of his first interrogation. Once inside, he struck the women and strangled them, sometimes by hand and more often, according to the weekly Argumenty i Fakty (AiF), with whatever was at hand: an iron's cord, a clothesline, an apron, a pillow. He took money and sometimes valuables. AiF reported that in some apartments he left cash and jewelry in plain view, one reason investigators treated the series as the work of a serial killer rather than a robber.
Investigators noticed in 2011, AiF reported, that the victims lived in buildings near busy roads, on the third floor or lower, and concluded that he planned his escape through a window.
At the trial, prosecutors gave this account of the first murder. On March 5, 2011, Tagirov followed Nasima Ishmuratova home, knocked at her door posing as a utility worker, struck her with a blunt object and strangled her with a scarf. The prosecution said he took 7,000 rubles. Police found 2,000 rubles on the balcony and two empty glasses on the kitchen table.
Her daughter Alfiya, who was 74 when she testified in November 2022, told the court she had last visited her mother with her husband on March 4. She described her mother as talkative but not trusting: she let into the apartment only building staff who came with the building's senior resident. A neighbor, Tatyana Ovchenkova, testified that on the day of the murder she had seen a young man near the entrance who seemed lost and came up to her. She remembered polished boots, a leather jacket, a hat and light hair. During a reconstruction in August 2021, she pointed to Tagirov as someone she could have met that day. Later that afternoon, she said, she saw a body being carried out of the building in a bag.
AiF reported that Ishmuratova's body was not found at once and that investigators first looked for the killer among people close to her. AiF gave her age as 85; Business Online, which covered the trial, gave it as 90.
Tagirov's pretrial statements, read out in court, described the second Kazan episode, in the spring of 2011. He said he met an elderly woman outside a store, offered to carry her bags, and later asked to borrow 1,000 rubles. She fetched the money from her balcony, and he attacked her to get more. He left with 1,000 rubles and her keys. He had first told investigators that he gained her trust over three days and attacked her while intoxicated.
According to AiF, seven more attacks of the same kind on women over 75 followed in Kazan. In one of them, the eighth in AiF's count, a woman let the man in without fear. He struck her in the face several times and strangled her until she lost consciousness, then left, believing she was dead. She came to and called the police. She was almost blind and could not describe him, so no sketch could be made from her account. The Moscow Times, citing investigators, later put the number of murders in Kazan at nine.
In September 2011, in Volzhsk, in the Mari El Republic just across the Volga from Tatarstan, the killer strangled a pensioner with the cord of an iron and began searching her apartment. Her son came home unexpectedly and tried to hold him. The man got away through a window. After that, AiF reported, he chose women who lived on the second floor or lower.
The killings spread to other regions. The Supreme Court's 2025 ruling records that one victim, identified only by the initial Zh., was attacked and killed between 8:00 and 10:30 a.m. on March 8, 2012. AiF reported that the DNA that later identified Tagirov came in part from sweat on a scarf and on a lighter that the killer left in two apartments in Yekaterinburg, and that these traces matched those from the earlier killings on the Volga. Mediazona, citing the Tatarstan branch of the Investigative Committee, reported that the last known victim was killed in Bashkortostan, whose capital is Ufa, in September 2012. The Investigative Committee's final count runs to October 2012.
The court counted three attempted murders among the 34 victims. The Supreme Court ruling identifies the three women who survived only by initials and says that Tagirov "could not cause their deaths due to circumstances beyond his control." The published rulings and reports do not say which three attacks they were, though the blind woman in Kazan and the woman in Volzhsk whose son interrupted the attack fit the description.
Then the attacks stopped. AiF reported that investigators searched DNA databases of former prisoners and registered drug users, and that some came to believe the killer had died.
AiF's account of the investigation says detectives first noticed the similarity between the Tatarstan killings about six months after the first one. A couple of months later the cases were merged into a single criminal case and a task force was set up. The killer was regarded as one of the most wanted men in Russia and one of the hardest to find. No witness had a good look at him. Building cameras caught him only a couple of times, and the footage was so poor that investigators could not even judge his age. The photofit made in Kazan, Business Online reported, bore little resemblance to him.
In 2013 Russia's Interior Ministry offered 1 million rubles for information leading to the killer. In 2017 federal investigators tripled the reward to 3 million rubles, about $40,000.
Other men were looked at. AiF names two. One was a seller of dietary supplements who had gone door to door among elderly residents when the killings were at their peak; he had a partial alibi, and a polygraph examination cleared him. The other was Pavel Shayakhmetov, 38, from Kazakhstan, who was detained in March 2017 over three murders and was thought for a time to fit the profile. He killed himself a year later. Neither was charged in the Volga series.
By the Committee's figures, more than 10,000 people were checked and more than 5,000 forensic examinations were carried out before a suspect was named. The Committee told reporters after the arrest that "all acts were committed by one person," on the basis of the matching genotype and footprints and the uniform way the attacks were carried out.
Tagirov was found, according to Business Online, because of his mother. He had stopped contacting her, and she asked the police to put him on the wanted list. A biological sample taken in that process put his genetic profile into the law enforcement database, and it matched the profile from the crime scenes. AiF, citing its own sources, said investigators had also checked offender DNA databases, including abroad. Svetlana Petrenko, the Investigative Committee's spokeswoman, said the suspect had been identified after some 10,000 genetic examinations and comparisons with forensic databases, and that he had worked as a locksmith and had been convicted of theft in 2009. AiF credited the result to joint work by the Committee, the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service (FSB).
Police detained him at night at an acquaintance's apartment in Kazan, according to a video report by Moskovsky Komsomolets summarized by Kaktus.media. Mediazona dated the detention to November 30, 2020; the Committee and most outlets announced it on Tuesday, December 1. The Committee said he was being held in a case covering 26 of the murders and that he was "currently confessing." Press reports at the time linked between 19 and 32 deaths to the same man.
The Interior Ministry released a video of his questioning the same day. Asked why he had been detained, Tagirov answered, "On suspicion of murdering grandmothers." Told that the charge carried life imprisonment, he said he was ready to talk and added, "I don't remember how many victims there were." He said he did not count them and had followed the numbers in the news. He said he had looked for women near shops and markets, strangled them from behind and held on until they died, because he thought it was "a quiet, fast method, painless for them, it seemed to me." Asked why he killed rather than simply robbed, he said he could not explain it. "All that happened spontaneously. I wanted to eat. I lived partly on the street," he said, according to CBS News. He placed the first killing "in 2010 or 2011."
At a court hearing on his detention he asked for house arrest instead, saying he would not hide from the investigation and wanted to help his family. He remained in custody through the trial. His wife, AiF reported, said she had known nothing.
Over the following months Tagirov confessed to the series and, according to the Committee, took investigators to the scenes and showed them how each crime had been carried out. Video recordings of these sessions were later shown at his trial. A Reuters report in 2024 said he had confessed to 25 of the murders; the Committee had cited 26 at his arrest, and the final indictment charged more than 30.
On September 22, 2022, the Committee announced that its investigation was complete. Tagirov was charged with more than 30 murders, three attempted murders and more than 30 robberies with assault. The case reached the Supreme Court of the Republic of Tatarstan in October 2022. By then, Business Online noted, some of the people recognized as victims in the case, many of them pensioners, and some of the witnesses had died.
The trial was held before Judge Ilfir Salikhov of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Tatarstan, sitting in Kazan. It lasted 465 days. The judge took the episodes in chronological order, beginning with Nasima Ishmuratova.
From the first hearings, Tagirov denied everything. He said he had confessed under physical and psychological pressure. Questioned by the judge for about twenty minutes in November 2022, he could not name any of the officers, the agency they worked for or the place where the pressure was applied. He said his eyes had been covered with a bag or a cloth, that he had been struck in the chest with knees or hands, and that he had been told his family would suffer. He mentioned that his son had just been born. He spoke quietly, with his face partly hidden in the collar of his sweater, and said he could not remember where he had been on March 5, 2011. Because his account contradicted his earlier statements, the prosecutors asked the court to read those statements into the record.
At the trial he also said he had never been in the cities where the murders were committed. On February 13, 2023, the court heard witnesses, a session he later complained of on appeal because, he said, some witnesses heard the testimony of others before giving their own.
On February 26, 2024, the state prosecutor asked for a life sentence. His lawyer, Marat Ashirov, gave interviews in the days before the defense closed its case. He described Tagirov as a family man with a wife, two children and elderly parents. He said no witness had seen or identified Tagirov at any of the scenes, and that his client had confessed only because of pressure. In court, Ashirov argued that the prosecution had not shown how the crimes were committed and that the case rested on assumptions. The forensic reports, he said, found only that the biological traces at the scenes "probably" came from Tagirov and did not establish an exact match. He also quoted Marsel Gafarov, a former head of homicide investigations, as saying he was "99 percent sure" it was Tagirov, and argued that this was not certainty.
On March 5, 2024, Tagirov gave his final statement, reading from a folder of typed pages. He said the prosecution had no direct evidence against him and that he had no motive, since, by his account, he had always had money in those years. "Ruin someone's life over a thousand rubles? That's nonsense," he said. He said operatives had dictated the details he gave at the crime scenes, that the identification lineup had been made up of unsuitable people, and that in some of the towns where murders occurred he had never been taken for a reconstruction. He asked to be acquitted. The court reopened the hearing briefly to add documents on the victims' civil claims, which Tagirov refused to accept, citing his family's finances. The prosecutor, Lenara Churkina, called him "one of the few serial killers of modern times."
On March 21, 2024, Judge Salikhov found Tagirov guilty of 31 murders, three attempted murders and 33 robberies. Under Russian law the murders were charged as the killing of two or more persons, of a person known to be helpless, for gain. The court imposed life imprisonment for the murders, 13 years for the attempted murders, and 8 to 11 years for each robbery; the separate terms, Business Online calculated, added up to more than 363 years. The court combined them into a single life sentence and added part of the unserved 2009 term. Tagirov was ordered to serve the first ten years in a prison, the strictest form of Russian custody, and the rest in a special-regime colony. He was ordered to pay between 150,000 and 1 million rubles in moral damages to individual victims' families, four claims totaling 1.72 million rubles according to RIA Novosti, and 600,000 rubles in court costs.
Tagirov sat through the reading with his back to the courtroom and his hood up, according to Business Online. Afterward he said only that he had heard it. One victim's family was in the room: Alfiya Ishmuratova, now in her mid-seventies, with her daughter. Many other relatives, the paper reported, were old themselves, could not travel, or had died. "I still haven't come to my senses," Ishmuratova said afterward. She said she was satisfied with the verdict and had no demands of Tagirov. "He took nothing from my mom, he just killed her," she said. The prosecutor said she considered the sentence fair. Ashirov said he would appeal.
Tagirov's appeal went to the Fourth Court of Appeal of General Jurisdiction. He called the verdict "illegal, unfounded and unjust" and asked for it to be overturned and the case sent back to the prosecutor, saying he had no involvement in the crimes. On December 10, 2024, the appeal court upheld the conviction and the life sentence. It changed only one detail, specifying the time window for the attack on the victim identified as Zh. on March 8, 2012. It turned down the defense's requests to re-examine evidence, to watch the investigative videos and hear audio recordings again, to call further witnesses and experts, including a specialist on hand injuries and a lawyer who had been present during the investigation, and to examine a broom that had been taken as evidence.
On October 27, 2025, his cassation appeal reached the Judicial Collegium for Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, RIA Novosti reported. A panel of three judges, presided over by N. P. Bezuglyi, heard it on December 25, 2025, with Tagirov taking part and represented by a lawyer, A. L. Ursol.
He made several arguments. He said he had not intended to kill the three surviving women, had caused only moderate harm and had stopped of his own accord. He said the appeal court had treated the case as a formality and ignored his arguments. He objected to the February 2023 witness session, accused the trial judge of hostility, and repeated that his confessions had been coerced or prompted.
The Supreme Court rejected each point. On the confessions, it noted that lawyers had been present at his interrogations and the on-site sessions and had raised no objections; that the videos showed him testifying "in an adequate state" and without prompting; that the courts had questioned investigators and a forensic expert and examined the medical records of the detention center; and that the only injuries recorded were marks from handcuffs. In a separate check after he complained to the Investigative Committee, the ruling says, Tagirov himself admitted that no pressure had been applied and said the complaint had been meant to deflect suspicion. On the evidence, the ruling lists his consistent pretrial statements, the forensic finding that biological traces on nearly all the victims and at nearly all the scenes belonged to him, testimony from people who lived with him that he could have been at the scenes at the relevant times, the protocols of his on-site statements, and the conclusion, drawn from "the characteristic features of the targets of the attacks and the methods of killing," that one person had committed all the crimes. A psychological and psychiatric examination found him sane. On the attempted murders, the court found that he had intended to kill and had failed only for reasons beyond his control. It found the sentence proportionate, and it left the verdict and the appeal ruling unchanged.
With the Supreme Court's ruling of December 25, 2025, the conviction became final. Tagirov is serving life imprisonment, with the first ten years to be spent in a prison. The ruling notes that he could still petition the Presidium of the Supreme Court for supervisory review. No later development has been reported, and the prison where he is held has not been named.
Proven in court: 31 murders, three attempted murders and 33 robberies with assault against women in fifteen cities between March 2011 and October 2012, upheld on appeal in December 2024 and on cassation in December 2025.
Confessed and retracted: Tagirov confessed to the series after his arrest and demonstrated the crimes at the scenes. From the start of his trial he said these confessions were forced from him. Three courts found no evidence of coercion; the Supreme Court cited his own later admission that no pressure had been used.
Disputed by the defense: the strength of the DNA evidence. Ashirov said the forensic reports stated a probability rather than an exact match. The Supreme Court described the finding as traces "belonging" to Tagirov on nearly all victims and scenes. The reports themselves have not been made public.
Counts that vary: at his arrest the Committee cited 26 murders; Reuters later wrote that he had confessed to 25; press reports in 2020 ranged from 19 to 32. The court convicted him of 31. The robbery counts appear as 33 in the verdict and the Supreme Court ruling and as 34 in one RIA Novosti report; some English-language reports described them as assaults on 33 or 34 further women, while the Committee counts 34 victims in all.
Unproven: Tagirov told interrogators in 2020 that he began killing in 2010; the court's series begins in March 2011. Reports that he was avenging a childhood of beatings by his grandmother are speculation, and his lawyer declined to discuss them. Investigators said in 2020 that they did not rule out further victims, but no further charges were found. Former investigator Amurkhan Yandiev, who worked on the Chikatilo case, suggested to AiF that the killer chose pensioners because they could not fight back; that is an outside opinion, not a finding.
About 1982: Radik Tagirov born, a native of Kazan (age 38 at his arrest in December 2020).
April 28, 2009: convicted of theft by the Sovetsky District Court of Kazan.
June 2010: released from prison, by one report on parole.
March 5, 2011: Nasima Ishmuratova, 90, killed in her apartment in the Kirovsky district of Kazan, the first murder in the series.
Spring to summer 2011: further attacks in Kazan; one woman, nearly blind, survives.
September 2011: in Volzhsk, a woman's son interrupts an attack; the killer escapes through a window.
Late 2011: Tatarstan cases merged and a task force formed, by AiF's account.
Early 2012: by his own account, Tagirov moves to Moscow.
March 8, 2012: the victim identified as Zh. is killed.
September to October 2012: last known killings, the last in Bashkortostan by Mediazona's account.
2013: Interior Ministry offers a 1 million ruble reward.
2017: reward raised to 3 million rubles.
2018: by his own account, Tagirov returns to Kazan.
November 30 to December 1, 2020: detained in Kazan after a DNA match; confesses on video.
August 2021: a Kazan neighbor of the first victim points to him at a reconstruction.
September 22, 2022: Investigative Committee completes its investigation.
October 2022: case sent to the Supreme Court of the Republic of Tatarstan; Tagirov denies the charges.
February 26, 2024: prosecutor asks for life imprisonment.
March 5, 2024: Tagirov's final statement asks for acquittal.
March 21, 2024: convicted of 31 murders, three attempted murders and 33 robberies; sentenced to life.
December 10, 2024: Fourth Court of Appeal of General Jurisdiction upholds the verdict.
October 27, 2025: cassation appeal reaches the Supreme Court of Russia.
December 25, 2025: Supreme Court rejects the cassation appeal; the conviction stands.