On the morning of 3 June 2000, Nura Luluyeva, an unemployed nurse and kindergarten teacher and the mother of four children (ages 6–21),[1] was selling strawberries on Mozdokskaya Street of Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, with her cousins Markha Gakayeva (b.
A group of armed men in ski masks raided the marketplace on top of an armoured personnel carrier with a hull number 110; their leader told a witness that he was from the FSB and some of "their guys" have been killed there.
A search by her husband Said-Alvi Luluyev, a former Soviet-era judge from Gudermes, did not bring any results, despite him contacting authorities from different ministries at various levels, petitioning, and even personally looking for her in detention centres and prisons in Chechnya and beyond in North Caucasus.
[4] In February 2001, eight months after the abduction and shortly after the official investigation was "suspended for lack of information",[3] the bodies of the missing women were discovered among some 60 mostly disfigured corpses uncovered from a dumping ground in an abandoned Zdorovye dacha summer house settlement located in the vicinity of Khankala, the main Russian military base in Chechnya outside Grozny.
There existed a body of evidence that attained the standard of proof "beyond reasonable doubt", which made it possible to hold the state authorities responsible for Nura Luluyeva's death."