'His Murder Is Necessary': Man Who Exposed Kyrgyz Smuggling Scheme Was Hunted by Contract Killers

One year ago this week, Aierken Saimaiti, a self-confessed money launderer, was gunned down in an Istanbul cafe.

Turkish police have pointed to religious extremism as the motive for the crime. Two of the four alleged killers, who remain in custody pending trial, have been described by police as Islamist militants who said they murdered Saimaiti because “he was not a Muslim.”

There were already ample reasons to suspect that this was not the whole story.

Before his assassination-style shooting, the 37-year-old Chinese-born Uighur had provided journalists with a trove of records attesting to his role in funneling hundreds of millions of dollars out of Kyrgyzstan for a secretive smuggling syndicate.

Ensuing investigations by RFE/RL’s Radio Azattyk, OCCRP, and Kloop implicated Raimbek Matraimov, the Central Asian country’s former deputy customs chief, and Khabibula Abdukadyr, the cargo tycoon with whom he did business, as being at the heart of the corruption Saimaiti revealed.

The stories triggered anti-corruption protests in Kyrgyzstan and ultimately contributed to a popular uprising in the wake of last month’s parliamentary elections.

Before his murder, a frightened Saimaiti told reporters that he had been warned not to reveal any more of Matraimov’s secrets. “If you share them, we will kill you,” he recalled being told.

Now, Turkish police records leaked to reporters, including a statement made by Saimaiti’s widow and transcripts of his alleged killers’ interrogations, offer additional details that shed serious doubt on the extremism narrative.

According to the man who pulled the trigger, he was hired by a militant to carry out a contract-style killing. The gunman said the religious pretext had been fed to him by this man. Moreover, the records show that just a day after the murder, Saimaiti’s wife, Wufuli Bumailiyamu, pointed to Matraimov and Abdukadyr, the men whose affairs her husband had revealed to journalists, as the orchestrators of the killing.

“He told me if something happens to him, I should tell all these events to the police, and that he would be killed by these people,” Bumailiyamu said.

The extent to which the Turkish police have pursued these leads, or may yet pursue them, is unclear. The records do show that the police asked the alleged gunman about Abdukadyr, but he said he did not know him.

When reached by reporters, Bumailiyamu did not deny the authenticity of the testimony, but declined to comment on Matraimov or Abdukadyr. Neither Abdukadyr nor Turkish police responded to requests for comment.

In an email to reporters, Matraimov said he had “no connection” with Saimaiti’s death and claimed that the Turkish police had already brought those responsible to justice, though there is no indication that a trial has taken place. He also claimed that, though he has visited Istanbul since the murder, he was never interrogated by Turkish police.

A Man Named ‘Adem’

On November 12, 2019, less than 48 hours after Saimaiti’s murder, police in the southern Turkish city of Adana announced that two men identified as Kyrgyz citizens, Huseyin Ahmetaliyev and Abdullah Enver, as well as a Syrian citizen, had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in the slaying.

The three men had been detained while attempting to cross the border into Syria, the police announced. A fourth suspect was later arrested after the alleged murder weapon was found in his home.

In a subsequent interview with Radio Azattyk, Adnan Kilic, a senior Adana police official at the time, said that Ahmetaliyev and Enver had links to militant Islamic groups in Syria. He also told reporters the purported motive for Saimaiti’s killing: the victim’s lack of piety.

“During the interrogation, they said that they killed [Saimaiti] because he wasn’t a Muslim,” Kilic said.

But according to his own testimony, the accused killer did not know Saimaiti and was simply carrying out a contract hit. The purported religious motive, they said, was given to them by a Syria-based militant going by the name “Adem,” whom they described as the organizer of the operation.

“When I asked why we need to kill him, [Adem] said: ‘He is not Muslim, he is an infidel, his murder is necessary,’” Enver, the accused gunman, told Turkish police.

He said that Adem played a hands-on role in organizing the killing, from the finances down to coordinating taxi rides, and that Adem instructed him to travel to Istanbul to meet Ahmetaliyev, the other conspirator. Adem also provided Saimaiti’s photograph, address, and license-plate number, as well as $1,500 “for the road,” Enver said. Adem also promised the two men $50,000 each to carry out the hit.

Reporters were unable to establish Adem’s true identity. Enver described him as an Uzbek national, around 28 years old, clean-shaven with dark skin. Adem appeared to be well-off financially, and had a wife and least one child.

Enver told police that he had met Adem at a militant training camp in Syria run by a group called Katiba al-Tawhid wal-Jihad (“Brigade of Monotheism and Holy War”). Composed primarily of Uzbeks and men from other Central Asian nations, the organization had previously pledged allegiance to the Al-Nusra Front, the Syrian affiliate of Al-Qaeda.

Enver described Adem as an “administrative manager” with the terrorist group, handling issues such as the purchase of food, drinks, and firearms. Enver said that he himself had spent around five years with the group in Syria, receiving weapons training.

The Killing

Enver said he arrived in Istanbul three weeks before killing Saimaiti, and that upon his arrival, his alleged accomplice, Ahmetaliyev, already had information about their target.

He said that they tracked Saimaiti’s movements for around two weeks.

The pair aborted their initial assassination attempt after getting cold feet, Enver testified. After that incident, he said, they called Adem to tell him what had happened.

“He said: ‘Shoot him. If you don’t shoot, return the money and the money that was spent on you.’ And we replied: “OK, we will kill him.”

On the evening of November 10, 2019, they followed Saimaiti to the Kunlun Hotel, where he was sitting at an outdoor cafe with two friends, one of whom was the hotel’s owner.

It was Enver’s job to carry out the shooting, while Ahmetaliyev waited in the getaway car. According to Enver’s interrogation, he once again had qualms, but decided to press on.

Security camera footage shows him descending the stairs of the outdoor cafe toward Saimaiti shortly after 8 p.m., raising his weapon, and firing several times. He then sprints back up the stairs and climbs into a black vehicle that speeds away.

“I can’t remember how many times I shot him,” Enver told police.

What Saimaiti Knew

If Enver’s timeline is accurate, Saimaiti’s final meeting with reporters, in late October 2019, took place just as his assassins picked up his trail.

In the meeting, which took place at Istanbul’s luxurious Ciragan Palace hotel, he handed over another pile of documents that confirmed what he had been saying for some time. They showed how he wired money to destinations across the world on behalf of his employer, Abdukadyr, using false pretenses to conceal the illicit nature of the proceeds — which he said included bribes to Matraimov.

He failed to show up for a subsequent meeting, at which he had promised to provide more documents that would further implicate Matraimov. Initially, he gave no explanation for his absence. Later, he said that he had become too frightened to continue, and that the threats against him had been mounting. He did not meet with reporters again before he was killed, though he kept in touch and continued to provide other information.

In her testimony to Turkish police, Saimaiti’s widow Bumailiyamu recalled the previous year as a period of increasing pressure on her husband.

In her telling, Matraimov and Abdukadyr were “threatening my husband with death all the time” over a financial dispute.

Saimaiti had passed an initial tranche of financial documents to a Radio Azattyk reporter earlier in the year. The program published an initial investigation in May 2019.

“After the interview,” Bumailiyamu told police, “the threats started to increase.”

She also alleged that Matraimov and Abdukadyr were “behind” the murder of a friend of her husband’s, whose bound and battered corpse was found in the trunk of his own car at Bishkek’s Manas International Airport three weeks before Saimaiti’s murder.

While Bumailiyamu did not give the friend’s name in the testimony leaked to reporters, she was clearly referring to the case of Khusan Kerimov, a 39-year-old taxi driver who worked as a cash courier for Saimaiti.

Kerimov regularly ferried large sums of money in his carry-on baggage on flights from Kyrgyzstan to Turkey, Saimaiti told reporters. On the night the courier went missing, he was supposed to deliver $1.6 million in cash to Saimaiti in Istanbul but never arrived. Kyrgyz authorities have charged four men in connection with Kerimov’s murder, including two natives of Osh who remain at large, according to a Kyrgyz parliamentary commission report released in June.

“The person, who was a friend of my husband and taking our cash to Turkey, was murdered and our money was stolen at the airport,” Saimaiti’s wife told Turkish police.

“My husband also said those two people are behind this,” she added, referring to Matraimov and Abdukadyr.

In his email to reporters, Matraimov denied any involvement in Kerimov’s death, saying that he had only learned his name from news reports.

As reported in a previous investigation in this series, when couriers like Kerimov brought cash to Istanbul for Saimaiti, they sometimes declared it as belonging to an Abdukadyr company called Palvan İnşaat Turizm Lojistik Sanayi Ticaret Limited.

Within weeks of the Istanbul police releasing their summary of the Saimaiti investigation, this company made a donation of nearly $170,000 to a campaign launched by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to help needy citizens during the coronavirus crisis. The company eventually became one of the campaign’s top donors.

The Turkish Ministry of Family, Labour and Social Services, which oversees the charity campaign, did not respond to a request for comment on the donation by Abdukadyr’s company and what, if any, due diligence was conducted regarding the firm.