The Kizlyar district court of Daghestan has remanded 44-year-old local resident and imam Magomedali Mirzakhanov to two months in pre-trial detention after Mirzakhanov confessed to police he had murdered his second wife.
The joint press service of the Daghestani courts reported the decision on Wednesday. According to investigators, Mirzakhanov had come to the police and confessed to the crime.
According to the case materials, the murder took place on the evening of 13 December 2025 in the village of Krasny Voskhod in northern Daghestan’s Kizlyar district. Mirzakhanov arrived at the house where a 35-year-old woman lived, whom he was in a Muslim marriage with. At that time, their joint seven-month-old child and the woman’s four children from a previous marriage were in the house.
That night, an argument broke out between the spouses. According to Mirzakhanov’s testimony, during the conflict, he strangled his wife to death. Later, he transported the body by car to the neighbouring Tarumovsky district, to the outskirts of the village named after Soviet writer Maksim Gorky. There, he washed the body in a canal, wrapped it in a sheet taken from the house, and buried it at a rubbish dump.
Relatives of the deceased did not immediately contact the police. According to them, the woman had previously sometimes left home without warning her relatives, so her absence initially did not cause alarm. A missing person report was filed approximately two weeks after the murder.
Almost two months after the woman’s disappearance, Mirzakhanov voluntarily came to law enforcement agencies and submitted a written confession. During questioning, he stated that the reason for his actions was jealousy. According to Mirzakhanov, his wife had behaved coldly towards him, and some of her comments made him think she was being unfaithful.
The pro-government Russian media outlet Tsargrad wrote that Mirzakhanov regularly used physical violence against his second wife, referring to sharia norms (the rules of everyday life for Muslims).
The court chose a preventive measure for the suspect in the form of detention in custody until 2 April 2026. He has been charged with murder, the maximum punishment of which is up to 15 years in prison.
Mirzakhanov previously worked as an imam in a mosque in the Tarumovsky district, but about six months prior to his arrrest, his contract ended and he was relieved of his position. Local media claim that in the village, he was known as a religious and respected person.
The murder is the latest incident of domestic violence in the North Caucasus.
At the end of January 2026, a 28-year-old resident of Daghestan, Razhidin Yaraliev, confessed to the brutal murder of his wife, 36-year-old Malvina Magomedova. A few days before, the dismembered and burned remains of a woman were discovered near the city of Derbent, which were later identified as Magomedova.
Elizaveta Chukharova
