Her remains were found with bullet wounds in the head and chest area at 4:30 p.m. in woodland 100 metres (330 ft) away from the federal road "Kavkaz" near the village of Gazi-Yurt, Ingushetia.

Estemirova was a frequent contributor to the independent Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta and the Caucasus news website Kavkazsky Uzel.

Along with Sergey Kovalyov, chairman of Memorial, she was awarded the Robert Schuman Medal by the Group of the European People's Party in 2005.

The Anna Politkovskaya Award is presented annually to honour the memory of Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya on the anniversary of her murder on 7 October 2006, by Reach All Women in War (RAW), an international human rights organization supporting women human rights defenders in war and conflict zones.

[10][11] Estemirova worked together with investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, both of whom were also murdered, in 2006 and 2009, respectively.

According to Tanya Lokshina of the Moscow bureau of Human Rights Watch, unknown individuals abducted Estemirova near her house in Grozny at around 8:30 a.m.

[15] Vladimir Markin, press secretary for the investigative committee of the Prosecutor General of Russia, said a body of a woman with bullet wounds in the head and chest was found at 4:30 p.m. in woodland 100 m away from the federal road "Kavkaz" near the village of Gazi-Yurt, Ingushetia.

These items were a passport, an ID of the Chechnya expert for the Human Rights Commissioner of Russia and the mandate of the penitentiary supervision public committee.

[16][17] Estemirova was "buried in line with Islamic tradition before sunset on Thursday, in a cemetery in her ancestral village, Koshkeldy, in Chechnya's Gudermes district.

"[18] About 150 people attended a vigil that was held in Moscow's Pushkin Square about nine days after the murder, following Russian Orthodox tradition.

[19] The BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, stationed in Moscow, reported that Estemirova was engaged in "very important and dangerous work", investigating hundreds of cases of alleged kidnappings, torture and extrajudicial killings by Russian government troops or paramilitaries in Chechnya.

UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe stated that Ban "urges the Russian authorities to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation in order to bring the perpetrators of this heinous killing to justice, and by doing so, to send a strong and unambiguous message that the targeting of human rights activists will not be tolerated".

[33] According to them, the main version of the official investigators is that Estemirova was murdered by rebel Alkhazur Bashayev, a member of a jamaat in the Chechen village of Shalazhy (Шалажи).