On a cold December morning in 2023, at around 8 a.m., 36-year-old Iqbal Alikhanova sent her oldest son to school before returning to her room to start chopping her dead husband’s body into pieces. She first cut his right hand through the palm, elbow, and shoulder, then moved to the left, slicing from wrist to shoulder with a knife and ax. She went out to brew tea for their 7-year-old son, who was watching cartoons and told him to have breakfast. Having told everyone that Zafar*, her husband, had not returned home since the prior morning, Iqbal went to her room and resumed dismembering Zafar’s body, cutting through both legs from the foot to the knee and thigh with unsettling precision.
“I had slaughtered many chickens before and thus knew the joints would separate if cut with a knife,” she said during an open court hearing on May 21, 2024.
Lastly, she cut his head off and placed the pieces into black polyethylene packages intending to throw them away with the garbage later.
Most Murderers Are Men
Women in Uzbekistan do not kill as often as men do. In 2023, nearly 300 homicide cases were reviewed by local courts across the country as first instance cases. Those mostly involved premeditated and attempted murders, with some cases of driving a person to suicide or causing death through negligence.
Women accounted for only 7 percent of these cases, with just 21 female defendants in total.
The share of women involved in premeditated and attempted murder in Uzbekistan has consistently been low, hovering around 10 percent. Notably, the country has an overall balanced male and female ratio of its 37 million population, so the lower proportion of women involved in killings cannot be explained by demographics alone. On top of that, the number of women who kill gradually decreased, from 11 percent (93 homicides) of the total share in 2007 to 7.2 percent (26 homicides) in 2023.
Women’s share in other types of crime has also been low. Data from the state statistics agency shows that only 10,891 women committed crimes last year compared to 78,022 men. The same pattern can be observed over the past 17 years. (Data for prior periods are not available.)
The small number of women who commit murder often have deep, complex stories behind their actions. Rarely do they kill for material gain. Unlike many men who kill, women who murder often have suffered a long history of abuse, threats, and violence.
When Iqbal married Zafar in 2017, she already had a son from her first husband. She soon gave birth to another son with Zafar. However, when Zafar began drinking more heavily, his behavior changed.
“He would get jealous without reason, stalk me when I went to work or for walks, accuse me of cheating and having HIV, and threaten to take my children away,” she explained in court. Worse still, Zafar had been sexually abusing her oldest son for the past two years, she claimed.
On December 22, 2023, after Zafar consumed another bottle of alcohol and began humiliating and threatening her again, Iqbal finally snapped. Overwhelmed by the fear of losing her children, she took an ax and struck Zafar three times in the head. It took her an hour to fully grasp what she had done before she hid the body and started running errands, taking care of the children and household.
In May 2024, Iqbal was sentenced to 13 years and three months in prison.
Prevalence of Domestic Violence in Uzbekistan
Iqbal Alikhanova’s experience with domestic violence is far from unique. Each year, around 40,000 women file for protection orders from the government. Considering the cultural stigma, gaslighting, lack of trust in the protection system, and the patriarchal nature of law enforcement, it’s clear that this number only scratches the surface. Many hundreds of thousands of women likely remain silent, enduring the abuse in isolation.
Even with these small numbers, the data reveals a troubling pattern: women face most of the abuse at home – the very place where they should feel safest. In 2021-2022 alone, over 72,000 women sought help from law enforcement for various forms of abuse and harassment. Alarmingly, 85 percent of these cases, around 61,000 incidents, occurred in the home, with husbands and in-laws being primary perpetrators.
30-year-old Samira* was changing her clothes in her bedroom on a scorching hot day in August 2023 when her husband Bobur* came home intoxicated – once again.
“Your father-in-law says I’m an alcoholic, and you both always say I’m an alcoholic. I give you three talaqs,” he shouted, demanding that she leave the house.
Islamic shariah law dictates that a divorce is valid if a husband pronounces the word “talaq” (repudiation), or any similar term indicating separation, three times, whether he is sober or drunk. There is no room for reconciliation after three talaqs.
Samira was on the phone, trying to reach the police, when Bobur grabbed her by the hair and started beating her. Her father-in-law, who tried to help her, also took blows from Bobur.
“I was bent down, covering my head with my hands against his beatings when I saw a kitchen knife,” recounted Samira in the court hearing. “I thought I could use it to threaten him into stopping. I ran from my husband towards the kitchen, grabbed the knife and returned towards my father-in-law when I saw him bleeding plenty from his mouth. My husband was going to hit me with a stone again.”
Samira attempted to block the stone with her right hand while she stabbed Bobur twice in the chest with the knife in her left hand. She then heard her father-in-law scream and saw her husband run toward the street bleeding. Bobur died in their neighbor’s yard.
Samira’s father-in-law supported her in court.
“For seven years my son did not let her live in peace,” he said, praising what a good kelin, a daughter-in-law, she was to care for him and his late wife all the while. “My son would beat her so severely that when my late wife and I tried to intervene, he would also assault us,” he added.
The court found Samira guilty of manslaughter beyond the bounds of reasonable self-defense and sentenced her to one year of restricted freedom, essentially confining her to her home between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Who Women Kill
Only in one case reviewed by local courts in 2023 did a defendant kill a stranger. A 22-year-old waitress from Khorezm accidentally served vinegar to a customer instead of alcohol, leading to his death. She was convicted of negligent homicide and sentenced to two years of restricted freedom.
In contrast, in all other cases reviewed women killed someone they personally knew, mostly their husband, former or current partner, or a neighbor. Only on two occasions did they kill other women – one woman killed her grandmother trying to steal from her and the other killed her mother-in-law.
Madinabonu Kurbanova, a 30-year-old kelin, lived with her mother-in-law, Maysara Sodikova, and her 1-year-old daughter, Anora*. Her husband, Azamat, had left for Russia as a labor migrant – a common decision among many in Uzbekistan seeking to provide for their families. Tensions had already begun to rise between the two women after Madinabonu accidentally discovered that her mother-in-law was speaking to an unknown man over the phone in the beginning of October 2022. Maysara insisted that no one should ever find out, further straining their relationship.
In Uzbekistan, kelins have a particularly low social status. Their role extends beyond caring for their husbands, children, and managing household duties; they are also expected to serve their in-laws. Mothers-in-law wield nearly as much authority over kelins as husbands do, creating a rigid power dynamic. In 2021, 1,559 kelins filed protection orders against their mothers-in-law, though hundreds of thousands more likely chose silence. A 2022 survey conducted by the “Family and Women” research institute found that 26.3 percent of young female participants had been abused or harassed by their husbands for allegedly disrespecting their in-laws. Tashkent also reports 600 women, on average, die by suicide each year — during the COVID-19 lockdown, this number spiked to 900 – largely due to conflicts with their husbands or mothers-in-law.
On an October afternoon, Madinabonu was playing with her daughter when her mother-in-law, Maysara, stormed into the room with an ax. She demanded that Madinabonu leave the house, as she had before. Maysara struck her with the back of the ax on the hand, forcing her to flee. However, the realization that she had left her daughter behind drove her to return. Gathering her courage, Madinabonu picked up a brick and re-entered the house.
“When she tried to strike me with the ax, I hit her head with the brick in my hand,” Madinabonu later recounted in court. “She collapsed onto the couch from the blow and blood from her head splashed on the wall. As she got up and walked towards me again, I hit her with a brick one more time, knocking her down.”
Seizing the ax from her mother-in-law’s hand, Madinabonu struck her on the head and neck. When Maysara finally lay motionless, Madinabonu, gripped by desperation, used a knife and cleaver to strike her again. After ensuring her mother-in-law was no longer a threat, she washed her hands with cold water, changed her blood-stained clothes and, with her daughter in her arms, left the house.
Madinabonu is currently serving an 8-and-a-half-year prison term.
How Women Kill
Out of all 21 murder cases involving women perpetrators that I studied, three of them were appeals from previous years and lacked complete details. In all the other cases, however, women predominantly used sharp objects to kill: kitchen knives (15 cases) either as a primary or secondary weapon, an ax (2), or an unspecified blade (1). As noted above, in one case the victim died after drinking vinegar.
This is slightly different from how men typically kill women in Uzbekistan. Louisa Atabayeva’s research into femicide shows that 63 percent of women are killed by male family members: (ex) husbands, fathers (in-law) or brothers (in-law). Only 40 percent of the women Atabayeva studied were killed with knives or other sharp objects. The remaining methods include strangulation, beatings, arson, and other forms of violence, highlighting the broader range of brutal tactics men use to assert control and dominance over women.
At least four women who faced trial for homicide in 2023 were judged to not have been sane during the crime. They were hospitalized either for further examination (1) or for treatment (3), avoiding a prison term. The number of women registered with mental disorders in Uzbekistan as of 2023 is 54.4 per 100,000, while for men this indicator is slightly higher: 65.7.
Only in three instances among the murders studied were women under the influence of alcohol. Notably, only 0.9 per 100,000 women in Uzbekistan are registered with alcoholism and alcoholic psychoses, compared to 36.6 per 100,000 men, highlighting a significant gender disparity.
40-year-old Dilorom Abdurakhimova had been living with Jura Abdurakhimov for years, but only officially tied the knot seven years ago. Their family was far from ideal. No one at home worked, so Dilorom would earn by running small errands for others in the neighborhood. Jura, on the other hand, would spend her hard-earned money on alcohol. Their intimate life had been nonexistent for the past 5 to 6 years, and her husband frequently picked fights with her, driven by jealousy over a neighbor.
On the day of the incident, May 10, 2023, their daughter Lola was not home. Dilorom was drinking with Jura and two of his friends when, suddenly, Jura began insulting her in front of the group. As one friend left to avoid the escalating tension, Jura started hitting Dilorom with the bottom of a steaming pot. After enduring several blows, Dilorom managed to escape to another room and grabbed a knife.
“I wanted to show him the knife to threaten that I would kill either him or myself,” she later recounted. “But he came at me again and grabbed me by my hair as I was trying to flee. I turned around and plunged the knife into his neck.”
“My father did not parent me and was an alcoholic who lived off of my mother. Their fight was non-ending,” said Lola in court, pleading for leniency for her mother. “I love my mother because she raised me and provided for me, and I have no claim against her.”
Despite her pleas, Dilorom was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment.
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Editor’s Note: Names provided in publicly available court documents have been used. Names marked with an asterisk * denote those that have been made up as they are not available in the court documents.
Documents on homicide cases reviewed by local courts in 2023 were collected through the research project Data4Women: Expanding the Existing Database to Tackle Femicides in Uzbekistan, supported by ECA UN Women, where the author is taking part.
This article is the author’s separate research and the findings and opinions do not necessarily reflect the official position or endorsement of ECA UN Women.