Mourners attend Aishat Baymuradov’s funeral outside Yerevan, Armenia, 27 March 2026. Photo: Novaya Gazeta Europe
A Chechen woman who was murdered in a suspected “honour killing” after she fled to Armenia to escape domestic violence in her homeland was buried at a cemetery outside Yerevan on Friday, five months after her violent death.
The funeral of 23-year-old Aishat Baymuradova, which had to be postponed as her relatives in Chechnya did not respond to requests to take charge of her body, was attended by just 20 mourners. As Baymuradova’s partner and friends were denied permission to arrange her funeral themselves, the Friday ceremony was organised by the Armenian authorities.
Baymarudova was strangled on 16 October by two Russian citizens, Karina Iminova and Said-Khamzat Baysarov, who investigators said had acted on the instructions of “an unidentified person”. Having made friends with Baymuradova on Instagram, the pair lured her to a Yerevan apartment where she was later found dead by police.
Though Iminova told Baymarudova that she herself had fled to Yerevan from Dagestan, another deeply conservative Muslim-majority region in Russia’s North Caucasus, she in fact had strong ties to the Chechen security forces and several of her social media followers were later found to have connections to Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-installed head of Chechnya.
The Armenian authorities placed both Iminova and Baysarov on the Interpol wanted list in February, but they believe the pair have since returned to Russia, where they’re unlikely to face any legal consequences for Baymarudova’s murder.
Investigators said that Baymuradova’s body showed “small and large areas of haemorrhaging, consistent with blunt force trauma, [and] two small superficial marks on the right side of her face,” which they believe could have been caused by burning.
At the time of her murder, human rights activist Lidia Mikhalchenko told independent news outlet Caucasian Knot that Baymuradova had been the victim of an “honour killing”, a practice involving close male relatives murdering women for what they deem to be immoral behaviour in order to cleanse the family name.
Activists believe honour killings and attempts to kidnap Chechen women who have fled their homes are likely to continue, with one human rights activist telling Caucasian Knot that such killings simply “become more sophisticated and organised, better planned and more brazen”.
