Aishat Baymuradova, a 23-year-old Chechen woman murdered in a suspected “honor killing” in Armenia last October, was buried at a cemetery outside Yerevan on March 27.
According to a correspondent for The Insider who was present at the farewell ceremony, the coffin was carried out by men in black, believed to be funeral service workers, and was immediately loaded into a vehicle. This occurred in the back courtyard, meaning that those present could observe what was happening only from a distance.
As noted by Novaya Gazeta Europe, the funeral had to be postponed as Baymuradova's relatives in Chechnya did not respond to requests to take charge of her body, and was attended by just 20 mourners.
An error was also made on the plaque placed at the grave. Instead of the surname “Baymuradova,” which appears in the documents, the plaque bears the surname “Alikhanova.” The mistake apparently stemmed from the name of Aishat’s father, Alikhan. The plaque is temporary. The NC SOS (North Caucasus SOS) crisis group said the installation of a headstone would be the responsibility of relatives and concerned members of the public.
Aishat Baymuradova's body was found on Oct. 19, 2025, in the apartment in Yerevan where she lived after fleeing Chechnya. According to investigators, the cause of her death was mechanical asphyxiation (though Armenia’s Investigative Committee said this could not be determined with absolute certainty). Her body also showed hemorrhages and signs of blunt force trauma, as well as injuries that may have been caused by burning.
According to relatives and human rights advocates, Baymuradova had been subjected to abuse within her family since childhood, including sexualized violence. At age 17, she was married — not by her own volition — and people who knew her say she also faced abuse in that marriage. Baymuradova left a child behind in Chechnya, fleeing with the help of human rights activists who assist women from the North Caucasus.
In February, Armenia’s Investigative Committee named two Russian citizens, Karina Iminova and Said-Khamzat Baisarov, as suspects in the murder case and placed them on Interpol’s wanted list, although Armenian authorities believe both have since returned to Russia, where they are unlikely to face legal consequences. Investigators believe Baymuradova was strangled on Oct. 16 by Iminova and Baisarov, acting on the instructions of “an unidentified person,” after the pair befriended her on Instagram and lured her to an apartment in Yerevan, where police later found her dead.
Although Iminova had told Baymuradova that she too had fled to Yerevan from Dagestan — another conservative, Muslim-majority region in Russia’s North Caucasus — she was later found to have close ties to Chechen security forces. Several of her social media followers were also found to have connections to Ramzan Kadyrov, the Kremlin-backed head of Chechnya.
As The Insider previously found, Baysarov spent at least a year in a Moscow pretrial detention center from 2018 to 2019 in a case under Article 205.1, Part 1.1 of the country’s criminal code, which covers “aiding terrorist activity.” However, there is no publicly available information about the case having been heard in court, nor about any verdict being issued. Baysarov is not listed in Russia’s federal register of terrorists and extremists, suggesting that the case was dropped.
