"She crossed the path of some very serious people."
On July 15, 2009, Russian journalist and human rights activist Natalia Estemirova was murdered. Like her colleague and friend Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered three years earlier, she worked on human rights violations in Chechnya.
"She crossed some very important people," is how Natalia's daughter, Lana Estemirova, explained her death. Those who ordered the murder have not been named and have not been punished. A Russian court "appointed" a militant, killed several months later, as the perpetrator.
The sequence of events has been restored.
1. Natalia Estemirova was born in 1958 in Kamyshlov, Sverdlovsk Oblast, to a Russian-Chechen family. As a young woman, she moved to Grozny, where she graduated with a degree in history from the university and then worked as a history teacher at a Grozny school.
With the outbreak of the Second Chechen War in 1999, Estemirova began collecting information on civilian casualties during the fighting. In 2000, Estemirova became a leading employee of the Grozny office of the Memorial Human Rights Center, fully transitioning to human rights work.
2. As a Memorial employee, Natalia Estemirova documented human rights violations in Chechnya. She collected data on extrajudicial executions, torture in custody, disappearances, and falsified criminal cases. Estemirova visited crime scenes, interviewed witnesses, and entered information into victim databases. She also collaborated with journalist Anna Politkovskaya, providing her with verified information from the region for publication in Novaya Gazeta.
3. An example of Estemirova's work was the collection of evidence following the airstrike on the village of Rigakhoy on April 9, 2004, which killed Maidat Tsintsayeva and her five children. The military claimed that the house was destroyed by the detonation of a militant warehouse. Estemirova personally arrived at the scene, collected eyewitness testimony, and documented fragments of unspent fuel from an RBK-500 missile. Based on these materials, in 2008 (in the case of "Tsintsayeva v. Russia"), the ECHR officially ruled that the family died as a result of a Russian air strike, dismissing the military's theory as untenable.
4. Estemirova's publication of reports on kidnappings led to public conflicts with the republic's authorities. In 2008, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov expressed dissatisfaction with Estemirova's work at a meeting with human rights activists, after which she was removed from her position as chair of the Public Council for Human Rights under the Grozny administration. Due to threats, Natalya left for the UK with her daughter for several months, but in the fall of 2008, she returned to Grozny and continued her work.
5. On the morning of July 15, 2009, at around 08:30 AM, Natalya Estemirova left her home in Grozny, heading to a work meeting. She didn't make it to the office, and her mobile phone was dead. Colleagues from Memorial went to her home and interviewed local residents. Two witnesses reported seeing Natalya forcibly placed into a white VAZ-2107 on Bohdan Khmelnitsky Street from their balcony. They said she managed to scream that she was being taken away by force. Human rights activists passed the information on to the Chechen Ministry of Internal Affairs.
6. That same day, at 16:30 PM, Natalia Estemirova's body, with gunshot wounds to the head and chest, was discovered in a forest belt 100 meters from the Kavkaz federal highway, near the village of Gazi-Yurt in Ingushetia's Nazran district. The Memorial Human Rights Center issued a statement that same day, linking the murder to her professional activities.
The Russian Investigative Committee has named Alkhazur Bashayev, a member of Islam Uspakhadzhiev's armed group, as the prime suspect. According to the agency, Bashayev himself was killed in the fall of 2009, leading to the posthumous charges against him.
7. Estemirova's colleagues published a report calling the "Bashayev version" fabricated. Memorial director Oleg Orlov placed political responsibility for the murder on the Chechen leadership.
On August 31, 2021, the ECHR issued its ruling in the case of Estemirova v. Russia. The court found that key materials from the criminal case had not been provided to the court, and that the investigation had ignored the possibility of security forces' involvement in the crime. The ECHR found the state's direct guilt in organizing the murder unproven, but unanimously found that the Russian authorities had violated Article 2 of the European Convention—the right to life.
8. The murder of Natalia Estemirova led to the suspension of the Memorial Human Rights Center's activities in Chechnya for six months due to threats to other staff. Estemirova posthumously received the Moscow Helsinki Group Prize. During her lifetime, she was awarded the Robert Schuman Medal and became the first laureate of the Anna Politkovskaya Prize. International human rights organizations annually issue demands for the investigation to be reopened to identify those responsible.
