Xavier Colás

Updated Friday, April 5, 2024-02:05

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Saltanat Nukenov

, during an argument with her husband last November, began to

take off all the jewelry

he had given her and

threw them into the toilet

.

Minutes later, she was dead

. The

only suspect

, her husband, is not a Kazakh anymore.

Kazakhstan's former Economy Minister

Kuandyk Bishimbayev is accused of killing her during an argument in a restaurant.

In his defense, he offers an implausible story: he says that they fixed things, although he admits that they argued heavily for several hours in a VIP booth at the restaurant. Saltanat, according to his version,

hit his head

on the tiled floor of the bathroom and also

"hit his knees"

against the walls. Then, Bishimbayev says,

she lay down and fell asleep

.

In reality, she was already a corpse

. He says she didn't notice her until the next day, when he tried to wake her up several times. Only eight hours later she noticed that she had no pulse and that her body was cold.

Bishimbayev and Nukenova met in August 2022 and in December, according to the prosecution, they "married", but did not officially register the marriage. According to friends of the victim,

she frequently had wounds on her body

that were impossible to cover. When questioned, Saltanat admitted several times that she had quarreled with her husband. The relationship was so complicated that she once even went home with her parents, but Bishimbayev assured her that everything would change. The politician asked her for forgiveness and she returned.

Bishimbayev

was arrested in November 2023

.

His trial began last month

. The politician pleads innocent of premeditated murder, but investigators have drawn up a detailed account of what happened. Bishimbayev hit and strangled her during an argument.

The cruelty of the attack has shocked Kazakhs

. Enraged, he dealt Saltanat a "series of crushing blows" to the head with his fists. He was trying to escape when Saltanat took refuge in one of the restaurant's VIP booths, but Bishimbayev broke down the door and hit her again. She fell to the ground, after which he began kicking her.

Aware of what he had done, he asked the restaurant owner – who turns out to be a relative – to

delete the surveillance camera recordings

and take his wife's phone home. The goal was to have an alibi. Bishimbayev now faces life in prison.

It all happened on the night of November 8. The argument started because his wife wanted him to accompany her to a concert, but he didn't want to go. The prosecution speaks of death by asphyxiation. "Bishimbaev grabbed Nukenova by her neck and began to strangle her, causing her to lose consciousness and die on the spot," writes 'Zakon.kz', which has interviewed the state prosecutor about this case. But forensic examination showed that the cause of Saltanat's death was a head injury.

Bishimbayev was "obsessively jealous", monitored all of his wife's phone calls, forbade her to work and

"systematically used physical violence against her"

, prosecutors' sources told local media.

Around ten in the morning the next day Bishimbayev woke up. Saltanat, according to him, was lying next to her, but he was unable to wake her and put her back on the couch, and then he fell asleep, without considering asking for help. He woke up around one in the afternoon and tried again to wake up his wife, but to no avail. In Kazakhstan it is the trial of the year, and the alibi for this sexist crime is a shame for the pampered political class.