Killing of Anastasiya Meshcheryakova

Anastasiya Meshcheryakova was a four-year-old Russian girl living in Moscow with her parents, Yekaterina Aleksandrovna Meshcheryakova and Vladimir Anatolievich Meshcheryakov. She had suffered birth trauma affecting her central nervous system and was diagnosed in 2012 with symptomatic multifocal epilepsy and motor disorders, including central tetraparesis. Her parents had spent significant resources seeking treatment for her, including trips abroad, and were planning further surgery in Germany at the time of her death.

On the morning of 29 February 2016, after Anastasiya's parents and older sibling left their rented Moscow flat, her nanny, Gulchehra Boboqulova — an Uzbek woman who had cared for the child for three years — allegedly strangled Anastasiya, decapitated her with a knife, placed the head in a bag, and set fire to the flat before leaving with the head. Firefighters received a report of the fire at 9:30 a.m., arrived at 9:38 a.m., and extinguished it by 10:05 a.m., by which point the flat was almost completely burned.

Boboqulova then took a taxi to the Oktyabrskoye Pole metro station, where she laid out a prayer rug and began praying. When police officers approached to check her documents, she instead showed them the child's severed head, stated that she had killed the child, declared she was going to blow herself up, identified herself as a terrorist, expressed hatred of democracy, and shouted "Allahu akbar." Police cordoned off the area, evacuated nearby shops, and closed a station exit. Boboqulova was arrested at 12:40 p.m., roughly 40 minutes after officers first approached her.

The case drew public attention partly because Russia's three largest television channels — Channel One Russia, Russia-1, and NTV — along with several smaller channels, did not broadcast news of the killing on the day it occurred, though they later published information online. Government spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated the Kremlin had not ordered any silence on the matter. The Anti-Corruption Foundation subsequently asked Russia's Investigative Committee to examine whether journalists' work had been obstructed.

Public memorials were held near the metro station and outside the family's building, and online fundraising collected more than 4 million rubles for the family. Anastasiya was buried on 6 March 2016 in Livny, Oryol Oblast, her father's home region.

Investigators questioned Boboqulova's relatives in Uzbekistan, including her eldest son, who said she had urged him to join Islamic State fighters in Syria after she married her later husband, who was separately arrested in Tajikistan. Boboqulova gave differing accounts of her motive, at one point saying Allah had ordered the killing and at another describing it as retaliation against President Vladimir Putin for Russian intervention in Syria. On 4 March 2016 she was formally charged with murder under Part 2, Article 105 of Russia's Criminal Code (murder of an infant), and later underwent psychiatric evaluation, including a transfer to a psychiatric hospital at Butyrka prison.