Due to the severity of the crimes and the fact that all the victims were ethnic Russians, prosecutors petitioned to try Gaichayev and his main accomplice on charges of genocide — the first such recorded proposition in the country's modern history.
[1] Their modus operandi typically included breaking into the house and subduing the inhabitants, whereupon Gaichayev and Khalidov would rape the female victims before proceeding to kill all of the family members in a variety of ways.
In one instance, killers broke into the house of Zemlyakov family, and after they had raped the wife, Gaichayev — the only person from the gang conclusively proven to have directly participated in the murders — grabbed an axe and hacked her to death.
[3] Rizvan Magomadov was detained in April 2001 during a sting operation in Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk Oblast, where he was the ringleader of a heroin smuggling ring along with several Tajikistani nationals.
The crimes were considered so severe that prosecutor Maria Semisynova suggested that genocide charges should be included in the indictments, arguing that the targeted killing of Russians was a clear example of ethnic cleansing.