On October 20, Armenian police said the body of 23-year-old Aishat Baimuradova had been found in a rented apartment on Demirchyan Street in Yerevan. Rights defenders and activist Daniil Chebykin had reported her disappearance three days earlier.
According to them, Baimuradova left Chechnya last year after years of domestic abuse. Sources involved in her evacuation said she had first suffered violence from her father and later from her husband, whom she had been married off to at a young age. She left behind a child, who remained with her former spouse.
Rights defenders helped move her to Armenia, from where she hoped to relocate to Europe, but she was unable to secure protection. After leaving, Baimuradova did not hide: she stayed active on social media and openly argued with supporters of Ramzan Kadyrov and with those attacking people who had fled the North Caucasus.
On October 15, she went to meet a new acquaintance named Karina, whom she had met on Instagram. It later emerged that the woman was not from the North Caucasus, but had traveled to Chechnya, and that her followers included people from Kadyrov’s circle, among them Rubati Mitsaeva.
“Aishat’s friends told me she did not return from a walk on the evening of October 15, when she went to meet a friend from Instagram,” Daniil Chebykin wrote on October 17, adding that her phone had been unreachable for a long time.
Activists said Aishat was last seen online in Telegram during the night of October 16 to 17. Armenian police said the body was found on October 19 after a caller alerted the Interior Ministry’s operations center; the agency said the circumstances of her death were still being established.
Lidiya Mikhalchenko, founder of the project “Caucasus Without a Mother,” said, citing unverified information, that Baimuradova may have been strangled and that possible suspects were caught on surveillance cameras. After news of the death became public, Karina closed her social media accounts.