[eldertoguro]

Aged 51, Natalya Estemirova served on the board of the Russian human rights organization Memorial and was its principal Chechnya researcher, recording cases of abduction, torture and extrajudicial killing. On the morning of July 15, 2009, she was bundled into a car outside her Grozny apartment building. That afternoon, her body was discovered in woods near Gazi-Yurt, a village in neighboring Ingushetia, with gunshot wounds to the head and chest. She was buried later that day in her ancestral village.

Nobody has been convicted. Memorial rejected the official suspect, and DNA found beneath her fingernails did not match any of the named men. In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Russia had not effectively investigated the killing, but did not hold state agents responsible.

[Razorhead]

Natalya Estemirova?

[Razorhead]

Dead body

[FavaBeans]

What the fuck for?

[Sharon]

Estemirova was abducted on 15 July 2009 from her home in Grozny, Chechnya. According to Tanya Lokshina of the Moscow bureau of Human Rights Watch, unknown individuals abducted Estemirova near her house in Grozny at around 8:30 a.m. Her colleagues raised an alert when she did not come to a planned meeting and went to her home, found witnesses and questioned them. Two witnesses reportedly saw Estemirova being pushed into a car shouting that she was being abducted. Lokshina said Estemirova was abducted as she was working on "extremely sensitive" cases of human rights abuses in Chechnya. Lokshina said that she had been targeted for her professional activities. Human Rights Watch had demanded to the Kremlin and Ramzan Kadyrov that Estemirova be returned home safely.

Vladimir Markin, press secretary for the investigative committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia, said a body of a woman with bullet wounds in the head and chest was found at 4:30 p.m. in woodland 100 m away from the federal road "Kavkaz" near the village of Gazi-Yurt, Ingushetia. Investigators found items belonging to Estemirova in the purse of the woman. These items were a passport, an ID of the Chechnya expert for the Human Rights Commissioner of Russia and the mandate of the penitentiary supervision public committee.

Funeral

Estemirova was "buried in line with Islamic tradition before sunset on Thursday, in a cemetery in her ancestral village, Koshkeldy, in Chechnya's Gudermes district."

About 150 people attended a vigil that was held in Moscow's Pushkin Square about nine days after the murder, following Russian Orthodox tradition. After all but twenty people had left, police arrested the organizer of the event, Viktor Sotirko of Memorial. He was held for two hours and charged with disturbing the peace. Police said only 30 people had been sanctioned to attend the event, but far more had shown up.