Pushed to the Edge: Why Women Kill in Uzbekistan

On a cold December morning in 2023, at around 8 a.m., 36-year-old Iqbal Alikhanova sent her oldest son to school before returning to her room to start chopping her dead husband’s body into pieces. She first cut his right hand through the palm, elbow, and shoulder, then moved to the left, slicing from wrist to shoulder with a knife and ax. She went out to brew tea for their 7-year-old son, who was watching cartoons and told him to have breakfast. Having told everyone that Zafar*, her husband, had not returned home since the prior morning, Iqbal went to her room and resumed dismembering Zafar’s body, cutting through both legs from the foot to the knee and thigh with unsettling precision.

“I had slaughtered many chickens before and thus knew the joints would separate if cut with a knife,” she said during an open court hearing on May 21, 2024.

Lastly, she cut his head off and placed the pieces into black polyethylene packages, intending to throw them away with the garbage later.

Most Murderers Are Men

Women in Uzbekistan do not kill as often as men do. In 2023, nearly 300 homicide cases were reviewed by local courts across the country as first instance cases. Those mostly involved premeditated and attempted murders, with some cases of driving a person to suicide or causing death through negligence.

Women accounted for only 7 percent of these cases, with just 21 female defendants in total.

The share of women involved in premeditated and attempted murder in Uzbekistan has consistently been low, hovering around 10 percent. Notably, the country has an overall balanced male and female ratio of its 37 million population, so the lower proportion of women involved in killings cannot be explained by demographics alone. On top of that, the number of women who kill gradually decreased, from 11 percent (93 homicides) of the total share in 2007 to 7.2 percent (26 homicides) in 2023.