Killing of Zarema Sadulayeva and Alik Dzhabrailov

On the afternoon of August 10, 2009, six unidentified individuals—four in camouflage and two in civilian clothing—entered the Grozny office of the charity Save the Generation and took Zarema Sadulayeva and her husband, Alik (Umar) Lechayevich Dzhabrailov, away, telling staff they were security officers conducting questioning. The abductors left a contact telephone number, but when colleagues called it, no one answered. The couple, both 33, had married only a month earlier. Sadulayeva led the Grozny office of Save the Generation, a nongovernmental organization founded in 2001 that worked with UNICEF to help disabled children, orphans, mine victims, and other victims of war receive rehabilitation and education. Dzhabrailov had previously been sentenced to four years in prison for participating in hostilities and had been released in early 2009 under an amnesty.

The morning after the abduction, August 11, 2009, the bodies of Sadulayeva and Dzhabrailov were discovered in the trunk of a car belonging to Dzhabrailov, in the Chernorechye area of the Zavodskoy district on the outskirts of Grozny. Both bodies showed traces of multiple bullet wounds. News of the abduction had already spread among human rights activists, who gathered the previous evening at a Grozny police building where the victims' parents had been summoned for questioning.

The killings drew immediate reaction from Russian officials. Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov called the murders a challenge to the Chechen government and to himself personally, demanding a swift resolution, and stated he would take personal control of the investigation. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered the Prosecutor General's Office, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Federal Security Service to investigate and instructed Chechen authorities to cooperate. A spokesman for the Investigative Committee, Vladimir Markin, said a team of investigators had been sent to Grozny.

Despite this early attention, colleagues and friends of the victims criticized the direction of the investigation, which reportedly suggested Dzhabrailov may have been targeted over a wartime feud and that Sadulayeva was killed incidentally—an explanation critics said did not account for reported signs of torture on her body. According to a 2012 interview with a Human Rights Watch/Russia official, investigators took roughly two years to identify a suspect from the sole witness's description and phone number, only to find that the identified individual, a police officer, had died during a security operation, effectively halting further investigation. In January 2015, journalist Elena Milashina wrote in Novaya Gazeta that the killings, along with other attacks on Chechen human rights and civil society figures, had not been meaningfully investigated. As of the most recent reporting cited, no one has been charged in connection with the deaths.