With violence against women and girls escalating to its most brutal expression – sexual assaults and murders of minors – people in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan are reconsidering the abolition of the death penalty.

Central Asia’s path to abolishing the death penalty was gradual but firm. In Kyrgyzstan, a moratorium on executions was introduced in 1998 and renewed every year until the 2007 referendum that formally abolished capital punishment.

Inherited from the Soviet era, newly independent Uzbekistan’s national legislation included about 30 articles prescribing the death penalty. The revised Criminal Code of 1994 reduced this to 13, by 1998 it dropped to eight, and by 2001 – to four. By 2003, just two crimes carried the death penalty, one of which was terrorism. A presidential decree in 2005 abolished capital punishment completely from January 1, 2008. During the constitutional reform process in 2022, some proposals to bring it back were raised, though they did not make it into the final document.

Yet public and political debates over capital punishment have never fully subsided. They resurface each time a brutal crime shocks society, particularly those involving young women or minors, and existing punishment is seen as too lenient.

This October, both Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan once again found themselves confronting the question of whether the harshest possible penalty should return.

A Tragedy That Shook the Kyrgyz Nation

On September 27, Aisuluu Mukasheva, a 17-year-old from Karakol, a city on the far eastern tip of Issyk Kul, left her home at midday to see a friend and disappeared. As her family rushed to the police, her body was found on the Zhel-Aryk highway in the Kemin district of the Chui region – raped, strangled, and discarded.

Police determined that her killer, 41-year-old Kumarbek Abdyrov, had offered her a ride and driven her to a nearby apple orchard, where he raped and strangled her. Abdyrov, who already had a prior conviction, then sold her phone, disposed of her SIM card, washed the car, and abandoned it in an attempt to erase the evidence. He was later arrested in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

Abdyrov, born in 1984, had been arrested in 2015 after attempting to kill a young woman, who survived the attack. He was initially sentenced to 12 years in prison, but the term was later reduced to seven. In 2018, after less than three years in detention, Abdyrov was released on parole.

While the news of Mukasheva’s brutal death shocked the public, it was the revelations that emerged during the investigation about Abdyrov’s possible involvement in previous crimes that angered the nation to its core. As the inquiry progressed, law enforcement gradually linked several previously unsolved cases to Abdyrov.

In 2011, a 22-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant was raped and killed in Bishkek. In 2014, two other similar cases occurred: 19-year-old Kamila Duyshibaeva, whose body was found strangled with her own scarf, and another