[4] Most alarmingly, he was suspected of physically and sexually abusing his daughter, as she was never allowed to leave the house after graduating school and was forbidden from going to university, leading to several suicide attempts in the early 2010s.
[4] On 1 June 2013, Shayakhmedov's son Roman died of a heart attack at age 25, having drunk a large quantity of alcohol mixed with coffee on the day of his death.
In the late 2010s, he was accused of sexual harassment by several female students, one of whom claimed that he had taken her behind a wooden toilet on the school grounds and started touching her intimate parts, but she managed to break free and inform her classmates and acquaintances.
[8] A few days later, his bike was found by a local resident named Anatoly Abashin, who for some time was considered the prime suspect in the boy's disappearance, but no charges were ever brought against him.
On the day of the murder, she went to his basement and demanded that Shayakhmedov buy a motorcycle that he had promised to give her, but he refused; instead, he grabbed a nearby hammer and hit her several times on the head, killing her.
[3] Investigators suspected that this occurred after Gnedova threatened to tell her parents about the sexual abuse she had experienced at Shayakhmedov's hands-on previous occasions; he initially denied this but later admitted that it was exactly the case.
[3] Shortly after Gnedova's disappearance, Governor Andrey Klychkov launched a campaign to locate the young girl, appealing to residents across Oryol Oblast, the neighbouring regions, and social media to help in the search.
[11] Thousands of concerned citizens from Kursk, Tambov, Belgorod, Bryansk, Voronezh, Tula, and Moscow Oblasts volunteered for the campaign, in addition to local and regional security personnel.
[2] During the search, wells, landfills, basements, outhouses, forest belts, and a number of industrial enterprises were inspected, with a sugar factory near Kazar pumping out its tanks full of raw material to rule out an accident.
[12] According to Armen Yeghiazaryan, the Deputy Head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, law enforcement worked tirelessly to pursue any and all leads, especially those concerning former convicts who had committed sexual offences.
Olga Martynova, Gnedova's mother, would later reveal that she and her husband were the initial prime suspects in the disappearance, alleging that investigators had attempted to bribe her into confessing just to see what her reaction would be.
To do so, he dug a tunnel under the foundation of the load-bearing wall of the structure, in which he placed the corpse, almost completely obscuring it from view aside from her feet, which were hidden by laying ceramic tiles.
To back up her claims, she presented photographs and medical reports, which showed that Shayakhmedov suffered numerous bruises and hematomas inflicted by blunt objects during his stay in the detention centre.
Martynova claimed that sometime after her daughter went missing, she overheard an argument between the Shayakhmedovs in which the wife supposedly said that she had helped him avoid arrest even before they moved to Russia, implying that he had committed other crimes.
In early 2023, Shayakhmedov was transported to the Mordovian Zone to serve out his sentence, but shortly after his arrival, he unexpectedly confessed to a fifth murder, which he claimed took place in Tajikistan in 1994.
[22] Following Shayakhmedov's death, representatives of Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs and the General Prosecutor's Office in Tajikistan travelled to Istiqlol in the summer of 2023, where they unearthed skeletal remains at the indicated place.
[23] With his guilt conclusively proven in this crime, rumours began to spread that Shayakhmedov possibly might have killed other victims during the Soviet years, while he lived in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
[23] In May 2023, the Russia-24 channel aired a programme titled "On the Trail of the Beast" (Russian: По следу зверя), which covered the Shayakhmedov case and even featured an interview he gave to reporters detailing his life and the circumstances of his crimes.