A high-profile case has begun to be heard in the specialised inter-district criminal court in Almaty. In the dock are 22 people, including former heads of departments at the Centre for Mental Health (CMH), ex-police officers, notaries, estate agents and repeat offenders.
According to ORDA, the defendants are accused of kidnapping and murdering lonely people with mental disorders who owned property. It is reported that the flats were subsequently re-registered and sold.
Former heads of departments Aizhan Dzhusupgalieva and Maira Urazaeva may be involved in the serious crimes. According to some information, they are suspected of passing on patients' personal data to members of the organised crime group.
Journalists learned that the criminal case had begun to be examined in court from the social media of Renat Kadyrov — a lawyer specialising in family and inheritance law. He said that “the organised criminal group systematically kidnapped mentally ill people for almost 10 years, depriving them of their freedom and property”.
“Using deception and abuse of trust, they committed crimes on an especially large scale. The criminal group developed a carefully thought-out scheme. They used the kidnapped mentally ill people as front persons for the illegal registration of real estate”, the lawyer writes.
Kadyrov also said that the organised criminal group had its own notaries.
“Doctors used their professional knowledge and access to patients to kidnap them, notaries provided legal cover, and repeat offenders acted as enforcers, physically restraining victims and eliminating unwanted witnesses”, the statement says.
It has become known that the criminal case was opened in November 2022. The investigation has identified 37 episodes.
According to some reports, the investigation began when a close relative of a deceased patient, who was the direct heir to his property, arrived in Almaty from Russia. However, upon arrival in Almaty, she discovered that the flat had been re-registered to an unknown person and sold.
In addition, the large investigation features an episode involving the murder of an elderly woman, Emilia Kondratievna. The woman's granddaughter, Eleonora Dolgova, said that her grandmother died in December 2020. Initially, the death certificate stated that Emilia Kondratievna died from an illness.
However, it became known in September 2023, when an exhumation was carried out, that the grandmother had died a violent death—by asphyxiation. The main suspects in the case are the victim's niece, Irina Gaparova, and a certain Ashirali Boltaboev.
Gaparova, for her part, claimed that shortly before her death, the grandmother wrote a will in which she supposedly left all her property to her.
“Irina Gaparova is my cousin-aunt. I met her as a child. She came to my grandmother for holidays—birthdays, anniversaries. But it was very rare. Once, after her visit, all my grandmother's savings disappeared—five or six thousand euros. I don't remember exactly. I was just a child then. And after that incident, my aunt disappeared for a long time, she didn't appear for about seven years. She didn't call my grandmother, and I heard nothing about Gaparova. Then in the autumn of 2020, I couldn't visit my grandmother regularly—I was working a lot”, Eleonora Dolgova recounted.
The exhumation of the woman's body was ordered after Eleonora Dolgova learned in 2022 about the investigation into a criminal case in which her cousin-aunt Irina Gaparova is the main defendant.
“The investigation found that, with accomplices, they kidnapped people from a psychiatric clinic who owned real estate but were lonely. Some were kept captive outside the city, others were killed and buried under a false name. It turns out they had been doing this for a very long time. We asked for our case to be attached to the other episodes of this big case”, Dolgova reported.
In addition, the young woman said that, besides her grandmother, they also wanted to exhume the body of her uncle.
“They wanted to exhume my uncle too: he was most likely also killed. The results of the examination of grandmother's body showed that she died from strangulation. Her hyoid bone is broken, which can happen precisely during strangulation. The trial has now begun. We hope for a fair examination of the case, and that all those guilty will be punished”, the young woman stated.
At the same time, she said that in addition to her grandmother's murder, the case also investigated another one — the murder of a former patient of the institution.
It is reported that the case was sent to court in August 2024. Dolgova believes the trial should be public.