
A road sign at the entrance to Khanibodom. Screenshot from the video “Канибадам мой город часть 1″ from You Frame‘s YouTube channel. Fair use.
In 2024, residents of Khanibodom, a small town in Tajikistan’s northern Sughd province, lived under constant fear of being murdered in their own houses. A total of seven incidents took place throughout the year when a group of criminals murdered and robbed entire families and attempted to stage them as family conflicts.
On December 21, shortly after two new cases, authorities announced arresting four suspects, but the residents were not yet relieved. Previously, the police had arrested two other suspects and sentenced one to 20 years and the other to life in prison, but the killings carried on, undermining public trust in law enforcement.
Here is a YouTube video about the most recent arrests of suspects.
By the end of 2024, a total of 23 people from seven families, including eight children, were killed. The first crime occurred from March 28 to 29 in a settlement named after Komil Yermatov near Khanibodom.
Mukhiddin Sharifov, 65, was found hanged at his home. His wife, daughter-in-law, and two grandsons were also found dead after having been strangled. The initial theory was that Sharifov was responsible, but it was quickly debunked after the authorities found out that all the money and gold in the house was stolen.
What followed were nine months of nightmare for the residents of Khanibodom and its nearby areas. After the second murder in April, which resulted in the death of 70-year-old Muzaffar Urmonov and his wife Inoyat, the police arrested Urmonov’s 66-year-old brother Sharifjon Ashurov. On December 12, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison despite pleading innocent. Ashurov’s arrest did not stop the killings though.
On the night from May 28 to 29, two separate families in the neighboring Zhahonzeb and Sanzhidzor villages near Khanibodom were killed with only three children in Sanzhidzor escaping that fate. The crimes were pinned on Marat Satorov, who worked as a security guard at a local school. In November, the court found him guilty and sentenced to a lifelong imprisonment. Satorov’s arrest also did not stop the killings, and two more families were murdered in December in a manner similar to the previous cases, creating doubt that the actual serial killers were ever arrested.
Adding to the hysteria and fear was the way the authorities have been handling the communication part of the investigation. The first official press release from the Interior Ministry on the murder cases came only in August and did not do much to alleviate worries and instill trust in the police’s ability to guarantee security. Deputy Minister of the Interior Abdurahman Alamshozoda stated that the murder cases were “ordinary,” not “sensational,” and at least two murders were family conflicts.
The second official statement from the authorities came on December 18, when the Sughd governor Rajabboy Ahmadzoda met with the public to assure that “specialists and investigators from various departments are working closely together to solve crimes and punish criminals as quickly as possible.”
Three days later, on December 21, the Prosecutor General’s Office shared that four suspects, all residents of Khanibodom and nearby settlements, had been arrested, revealing their names and ages. Allegedly, three of them had previously served prison sentences, though it was not clear for what crimes. Family members and neighbors of the suspects have denied the allegations, casting a doubt over the investigation’s effectiveness.
Here is a YouTube video with the suspects’ relatives denying the allegations.
The previous two arrests did not bear any fruit. Torture by the law-enforcement agencies remains widespread in Tajikistan, according to Amnesty International. Thus, given the growing public demand, there is a chance that the previous two and these four suspects were and will be tortured to confess.
Meanwhile, Khanibodom residents are coping by either temporarily leaving the town to live with relatives in other regions or forming patrol units to keep themselves safe. Their best bet right now is to hope that the Tajik police has actually caught those who have been terrorizing them for the last ten months.