The girl with sun-shaped earrings: A family remembers a murdered daughter

On a winter’s day in 2022, Mediyana Talantbekova failed to turn up for an exam. Two years later, her family and friends grapple with the events that led to her death.

This article is a collaboration between Kyrgyzstan-based media outlet Kloop and Al Jazeera and is based on reporting conducted between 2022 and 2024.

Osh, Kyrgyzstan – When Mediyana Talantbekova was about 10 years old, she would watch over her family’s calves. One day, one of them went to graze in a field of clover, a plant that can cause deadly bloating, and died.

Mediyana, who lived with her family in Osh, a city in southwestern Kyrgyzstan, was distressed by the calf’s death and felt she was to blame.

When her father, Talantbek Ergeshov, a farmer, returned home that evening he found her sitting quietly in a corner of the house. “What’s wrong, my daughter? You seem upset,” he recalled asking her.

Mediyana started crying. “Dad, I killed a calf,” she told him.

Talantbek comforted his daughter. “Aw my girl, don’t cry, it’s not such a problem,” he told her. He helped her understand that the calf’s death was not her fault and, to cheer her up, he told her he would take her to the bazaar the following morning to buy a pair of earrings.

That night, Mediyana got out of bed and went to wake her father. “Daddy, the sun is not rising,” she told him, impatient for the day to begin.

When morning came, Talantbek took his daughter to the gold bazaar to get her ears pierced. He then bought her a pair of earrings shaped like suns. He remembers how happy Mediyana was and how she told him: “Dad, from now on I will watch the calves so none of them dies.”

Twelve years later, on a winter’s day in January, Mediyana, a 22-year-old student, would fail to turn up for her dentistry exam. Her friends, family and the police would search for her for nine days until her body was discovered in the back yard of a house in Osh. Talantbek would go to the morgue to identify his only daughter, the sun-shaped jewellery still in her ears.

Mediyana was murdered by a classmate who, just a few weeks earlier, had drugged and raped her. The shame and stigma associated with rape, even more so in a deeply conservative society like Kyrgyzstan, meant Mediyana initially didn’t tell anyone. Instead, she felt compelled to “negotiate” a marriage to her rapist to secure a future where she could raise her unborn child.

‘She loved this house’

On a sunny day in early September 2022, Talantbek, 47, a small, solidly built man, dressed in a plain white T-shirt and lightweight grey pants, stood in front of the one-storey yellow brick house in central Osh where he had lived with Mediyana.

“She loved this house. While we lived here my daughter tried to do everything to make it cosy,” he said, describing how Mediyana had decorated the place with potted flowers, cactuses and succulents.

When it was warm, Mediyana and Talantbek would sit on the front porch on “toshoks”, colourful, burgundy-hued patchwork mattresses, drinking tea and talking about their day.

“She was always a very kind and smiley kid — very friendly,” Talantbek said.

Mediyana spent almost all her life in Osh – Kyrgyzstan’s second-largest city after the capital Bishkek – which lies close to the Uzbekistan border.

The city, which grew out of a settlement along ancient Silk Road trade routes, is known for the low-lying Sulaiman-Too Sacred Mountain, which has long attracted Muslim pilgrims and is one of three Krygyz UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Simple one-storey houses line narrow streets in the centre of the city of 300,000, while traditional eateries serve samsa, lamb or mutton pastries baked in clay ovens, and the bazaars are crowded and noisy.

In 2023, about 14 percent of Osh’s population lived below the poverty line, earning an average of $2 a day. Since the early 2000s, residents from Osh, and elsewhere in the country, have migrated to Russia in search of better work opportunities.

Potato pies and late-night studies

Mediyana’s family was no exception.

In 2011, her mother, Gulmayram, stopped working on the family farm to join her sister in the Russian capital to save money to build a new house. Later that year, Talantbek, Mediyana, then 11, and her younger brother, Adilet, then 9, joined her.

But the children didn’t like Moscow and returned to Osh to live with their relatives. They would visit their parents during the school holidays, and Mediyana would text and video call daily with Gulmayram, who still lives there, working as a cashier in a bakery.

Adilet moved to Moscow when he was 18 and found a job in a travel agency. Talantbek, who worked there as a security guard, returned to Osh in 2018 and lived with Mediyana while building a new two-storey family home in the quiet suburbs, growing apples and breeding horses.

Gulmayram, 47, speaks tenderly about her daughter over a WhatsApp video call.

“She was a very caring daughter and sister. I remember when me and her brother were working in the field, she brought us lunch — potato pies which she’d cooked herself,” she recounted, trying to hold back tears. “She was only seven years old then.”

Gulmayram says Mediyana was very goal-oriented.

“She was very diligent about her education. She would stay up as late as 1 or 2am to study,” Gulmayram recalled. “She was very eager to learn everything. She used to tell me, ‘Mum, look, I’m learning this now’. She attended English language courses …  Mediyana used to bake cakes for us and sometimes for her classmates’ birthdays. She was interested in useful skills.”

She would participate in school dancing and singing contests, got good grades and loved to read novels.

After the eighth grade, her parents decided to send her to a prestigious Kyrgyz-Turkish school. Mediyana was thrilled, preparing all the application documents herself before successfully passing the entrance exams.

The friend: Punctuality and a ‘pure heart’

Dinara Raimberdieva remembers meeting Mediyana during a morning assembly in the 11th grade. Dinara had just started at the school and found herself standing next to Mediyana.

“She asked if I was new,” the now 23-year-old recounted in a phone interview.

After the assembly, Mediyana grabbed Dinara’s hand – later on, she would often admire her friend’s hands, asking, “Why do you have such tiny, elegant hands?” and comparing them with her own longer, wider ones – and took her to their English class. The two quickly became close friends.

“She could easily get acquainted with anyone, she had a very pure heart,” Dinara recalled.

Mediyana had an hour-long commute to school with two bus changes. In winter, there could be delays due to ice on the roads, but she was always punctual, arriving on time for the first class at 8am. Regardless of the weather, Mediyana’s dress and shoes would be immaculate, her bag neatly organised and her hair tied into a ponytail or braids.

“She moved fast,” Dinara recalled. Mediyana would say that Dinara, the more patient of the two, reminded her of her mother. “When I am hugging you, it feels like I am hugging my mum,” she’d tell her.

She loved wearing bright clothing in university, sometimes ordering custom-made pieces. She never wore black. Dinara remembered how, “Before her murder, her last boots and jacket were milky-coloured.”

The aspiring dentist

At the new, sprawling, partially constructed house, Talantbek pulled out a photo album to show a picture of Mediyana holding a certificate of honour from her university.

Mediyana was still in school when she decided to become a dentist. “I remember once, when she was a teenager, she looked at me smiling and said, ‘Ata (“father” in Kyrgyz), I will become a dentist to make your teeth perfect,’” he recalled, laughing.

However, after graduating from high school in 2017, Mediyana failed the chemistry exam to study dentistry.

“She was devastated. We all told her not to worry and simply choose another degree … But she refused. She said, ‘No, I want to enter medical university and I want to become a dentist,’” Dinara recalled.

So, Mediyana took a gap year to prepare for the next round of exams, which she passed, and she entered medical school at Osh State University in 2018 with a major in dentistry. Her parents were overjoyed. “I did not get an education, neither did my husband. That’s why we were engaged in farming: crops and livestock. All our hopes were in the education of our children,” Gulmayram explained.

“There are people who are afraid of ambitious goals. Mediyana was not like that. She would set a goal and would do everything to reach it. She always wanted her parents to have healthy teeth, saying it was one of the reasons for her to become a dentist,” Dinara recalled.

Mediyana considered healthy teeth a mark of beauty and was mindful of her own, never adding sugar to her tea.

Cosmetic dental procedures are unaffordable on an average Kyrgyz salary but Mediyana aspired to be able to give this care to her loved ones.

Patriarchy and stigma

At university, men started to “woo” Mediyana.

In Kyrgyzstan, the traditional practice of wooing, or “juuchu” in Kyrgyz, involves a young man’s family asking a young woman’s parents for permission for the potential couple to meet as a precursor to marriage. Usually, the girl is consulted by her family and if she agrees, her parents will give their blessing for the meeting to take place. However, in rare cases, the terms of the marriage are negotiated without the girl’s consent.

In Kyrgyzstan, about 13 percent of brides are under 18, according to the 2019 UNICEF MICS survey, and must often stop their education to work or take up domestic responsibilities.

The risk of young women being abducted and forced into marriage also still exists, despite the practice being criminalised during the Soviet Union in 1982, and again in 1994 after Kyrgyzstan’s independence. In 2013, the criminal code was amended so that convicted perpetrators could face up to 10 years in prison.

In such cases, the relatives of the perpetrator might try to persuade the kidnapped girl to marry their abductor. In this deeply patriarchal culture, there are two key perspectives at work – the view that if a son has chosen his bride, his family must support his choice, and that, if a girl has entered a man’s house, leaving it would be shameful. In some cases, the victim is raped and claimed as a “wife”, ensuring the stigma would be too great for her to return to her family.

Although there are no publicly available statistics on the number of abductions, journalists from Kloop estimated that, in the country of about 7 million, almost 450 cases of abduction were registered in 2019 and 2020, with only 5 percent of such cases making it to court. According to data from the General Prosecutor, in 2021, 560 cases were registered of which 82 were transferred to the courts.

When the first “juuchular” – the suitor’s parents – approached Gulmayram, she asked a then 18-year-old Mediyana: “Kyzym (daughter), do you want to get married?”

“No, apa (mother), why?” Mediyana said. “If I’d get married now, I would not be able to continue my studies. Let me graduate from university. There is still plenty of time to start a family.”

Mediyana also told her friends she’d marry after finishing her studies. “She wanted [her future husband] to be perfect – supportive and respectful,” Dinara recalled.

SMSs and a bad feeling

In late December 2021, Mediyana called one of her closest university friends.

Aijamal, who requested that her name be changed in this story, speaks about her friend in the present tense as though she is still alive, but she has trouble remembering details due to trauma and the time that has passed.

Mediyana told Aijamal that a fellow dentistry student had been pursuing her for a couple of months. His name was Abdulbasit Nazaraliev. He was 23.

Aijamal recalled her friend telling her about the SMS messages Abdulbasit sent, declaring his love for Mediyana but accusing her of not taking him “as an equal”.

“I don’t want to go out with him, but he keeps insisting and sending me messages,’” Mediyana told Aijamal.

Aijamal had heard about Abdulbasit pursuing female classmates and then suddenly cutting off contact with them. She warned Mediyana to avoid him as “he was not a nice guy.”

Dinara and Gulmayram also heard about Abdulbasit around the same time.

Mediyana told Dinara that he “was hitting on her and treated her differently”.

“Honestly, I don’t know why, but I did not like him,” Dinara remembered thinking at the time.

She and Aijamal used the Kyrgyz expression “bir bilgeni bargo” to describe Abdulbasit. The phrase translates as “maybe you know something”, and refers to someone being sly or up to something.

Aijamal soon noticed a change in Mediyana’s behaviour. She became irritable and lost her appetite, saying she didn’t like the smell of certain foods. Aijamal, who had recently conceived, suspected that her friend was pregnant.

The attack: ‘Her vision went dark’

On the afternoon of January 10, 2022, Aijamal and Mediyana were walking home after an exam when they stopped on a bridge on the Ak-Buura River. Mediyana seemed troubled.

“You’ve changed, Mediyana. What happened?” Aijamal recalled asking.

Mediyana started crying and hugged her friend tightly, unable to speak.

Then, “She said, ‘Abdulbasit raped me and I think I am pregnant,’” Aijamal recounted. It was the first time she had seen Mediyana crying.

Her friend told her that in December she was in Abdulbasit’s car when, after drinking from a water bottle he had given her, “her vision went dark” and she lost consciousness. Then he raped her. Afterwards, he threatened that if Mediyana told anyone, he would spread a rumour that she was not a virgin.

Mediyana’s family and friends do not know the exact circumstances of the rape, or why she was in his car with him. She did not discuss that with Aijamal. And no one knows if they had any kind of relationship beyond the messages Abdulbasit sent her and some contact at the university. The only interaction Aijamal witnessed between Abdulbasit and Mediyana was him following her around on campus and speaking “nicely” to her. But after the rape, Abudulbasit cut contact with Mediyana and ignored her in public.

Nurzada Kupueva, a sociologist with the activist group Bishkek Feminist Initiatives, who has closely followed Mediyana’s case, says “uyat” or shame in Kyrgyz and victim-blaming are the two main reasons why Mediyana likely didn’t initially tell anyone or go to the police.

“These are closely connected,” she explained. “In our society, if something happens to a girl, she is often blamed, no matter how bad the situation is. It’s always seen as a woman’s fault.”

Kupueva points out that while the “uyat culture” is stronger in rural areas than in cities, Osh, though a city, is a strict, traditional society in which “women are even more susceptible to victim-blaming.”

Kupueva believes that Mediyana may have feared being blamed if she’d reported the rape to the police.

‘Negotiating’ with a rapist

Later that day, Aijamal bought a pregnancy test from the pharmacy and took Mediyana to her house. The test was positive. “I immediately suggested telling her parents, so the elders could help decide what to do,” Aijamal recounted. But Mediyana said she didn’t want to make her mother feel “ashamed and upset”.

“Let’s not tell them for now,” she told Aijamal.

Aijamal says Mediyana sent a photo of the test to Abdulbasit who soon replied, “We will talk about it later in person.”

Aijamal believes Mediyana met Abdulbasit the next day and recalled her friend telling her that Abdulbasist had promised to marry her, but insisted that she have an abortion first.

Mediyana refused. “How can I kill this little tiny human being, who lives inside me?” she asked Aijamal.

Kupueva believes it would have been very difficult for Mediyana to discuss her situation with her parents, particularly her father, even if they were close. Talking about any kind of sexual relationship, or abuse, is taboo, she explained.

Mothers are also blamed by society, and Mediyana likely wanted to protect both her parents, Kupueva added.

Mediyana would have understood her vulnerability – that to continue studying, build a career and have a chance of a family, she had to “‘navigate’ out of this situation,” said Kupueva.

“She tried to ‘negotiate’ with her rapist,” Kupueva said, and would have seen marriage to Abdulbasit as the only answer to a desperate situation.

Gulsara Ergeshova, 23, is Mediyana’s cousin.

She first heard about Abdulbasit on January 27, when she needed dental care and Mediyana suggested that she go to Abdulbasit for treatment.

“The next day, Mediyana came to visit me and as I had not seen her for a while, I was surprised to see how haggard she had become. ‘What happened to you and who is Abdulbasit?’” Gulsara asked her cousin, who she says was like a sister to her. “She told me everything about the rape and her pregnancy.”

Mediyana stayed with Gulsara until January 29 when, that morning, she told her cousin she doubted Abdulbasit would marry her.

“I found out that Abdulbasit asked a fellow classmate for a date,” Mediyana told Gulsara. Mediyana had been determined to keep her baby. But that morning she was distressed. “I think I will have an abortion,” she said, upset, “because he stopped returning my calls and isn’t answering my texts. He has turned out to be a liar.”

Gulsara thinks that Abdulbasit’s threats to spread rumours about Mediyana increased when he found out she was pregnant. “He insisted on an abortion and they had multiple fights about that,” Gulsara added, crying.

An exam and a disappearance

It was a cloudy Sunday morning on January 30 when Mediyana left home. She told her father that she was going to sit her end-of-semester paediatric dentistry exam. Because of staffing issues, the faculty would occasionally schedule exams on weekends.

Talantbek says Mediyana left, but returned after a few minutes saying she had forgotten her purse.

“Bye, ata!” she called from the doorstep. It was around 8:00am.

Twenty minutes later, Mediyana called Aijamal on WhatsApp. “I asked Mediyana where she was, and she replied that she was in Abdulbasit’s car and they were going to get tested for hepatitis,” Aijamal recalled. An ex-girlfriend of Abdulbasit, learning that they might have a relationship, had told Mediyana that Abdulbasit had viral hepatitis.

“Mediyana got scared that the virus could be transferred to her baby and insisted that Abdulbasit take the test,” Aijamal explained.

Abdulbasit had resurfaced after ignoring Mediyana’s messages and agreed to the test despite continuing to push for an abortion.

Aijamal said he told Mediyana he’d get the test done to prove he didn’t have it. His case file shows he was diagnosed with chronic hepatitis as a child.

The friends agreed to speak later. Mediyana would be applying lash extensions on Aijamal before their exam so she could “fly to her husband [in Moscow] all beautiful”, she recounted.

After they spoke, Mediyana sent a voice message to Gulsara: “If something happens to me, tell everyone that Abdulbasit took me … God forbid, I am just kidding,” she laughed nervously in the message.

Thirty minutes later, Aijamal called Mediyana. She did not pick up. A few minutes later, her phone was switched off.

After the 1pm paediatric dentistry exam Aijamal approached Abdulbasit. “Was Mediyana with you this morning?” she asked.

“No, I have not seen her,” he replied.

The search

Talantbek tried to reach Mediyana by phone. She usually came home to cook lunch, which they’d eat together, but her phone was off. At first, her parents weren’t worried. They thought maybe her phone, which was old and in need of replacing, had broken. But then her classmates called her brother Adilet in Moscow to say she hadn’t turned up for the exam. He called his mother.

“When I heard this, my heart got sick,” Gulmayram recalled. “She never could’ve missed the exam. Never.”

Gulmayram called Gulsara and asked whether she had seen Mediyana.

Gulsara was scared. She did not know how to react.

“I decided to call Abdulbasit myself,” she explained. “He answered … I tried to confront him, saying that I know everything about him [how he raped Mediyana], but he was so convincing about his innocence. He even offered to help search for Mediyana.”

Many of Mediyana’s friends and family were convinced that she had been abducted.

“I talked to her classmates, they knew nothing. Nobody suspected Abdulbasit — he showed up at the exam, right?” Dinara said.

Later that night, Mediyana’s parents called Dinara and Aijamal to ask if their daughter had contacted them. That is when Aijamal told Gulmayram about the rape. Talantbek decided to go to the police.

CCTV and a confession

Abdulbasit was arrested on February 8 while crossing the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border. He confessed to murdering Mediyana and burying her body in the back yard of his home.

The autopsy revealed that Mediyana was murdered on January 30 – the day of the dentistry exam.

According to Dinara Turdumatova, the lawyer for Mediyana’s family, Abdulbasit picked up Mediyana from her home, and drove to his house where he murdered her in his car.

He claimed she had a knife. Security camera footage shows him stopping at a shop where a salesperson confirmed that he bought a knife.

He said they were fighting when they pulled up at his house and Mediyana threw her phone at him. That is when he says he stabbed her. “Abdulbasit told the court that he wanted to take Mediyana to the hospital, but got scared of being arrested,” Turdumatova said.

He got out of the car, and, returning “20 minutes later, he realised that she was dead. He took her to the back yard, stabbed her eight more times, cut her throat, dismembered her body and buried her.”

According to the case file, Abdulbasit then put the knife and the university documents Mediyana had with her that day into a bag and threw them in the toilet outside his house. At around 12:05pm, he went to the university for the exam and then had lunch with classmates. He returned home at around 8pm, and threw Mediyana’s phone and bag into a nearby river.

In July 2022, six months after the murder, a first-instance court sentenced Abdulbasit to 15 years in prison.

In Kyrgyzstan, receiving a life sentence for murder is rare. According to a 2020 Kloop investigation into femicide, since 2008 there have been at least 300 cases of femicide in Kyrgyzstan. Kloop journalists found that even when the circumstances of a murder were consistent with first-degree murder, perpetrators often received sentences applicable to second-degree murder – that is, 10 to 15 years in prison.

In the case of Mediyana, the court did not take into account the aggravating circumstances of her murder — her pregnancy, its brutality and the attempt to conceal the crime through dismemberment, Turdumatova explained.

The sentence devastated Mediyana’s relatives and friends who argued it was too lenient.

Mediyana’s family appealed the decision. On September 30, 2022, the Osh Regional Court modified the previous decision and sentenced Abdulbasit to life imprisonment.

Abdulbasit’s lawyers issued an appeal at the Supreme Court to reinstate the original sentence. On February 1, 2023, the Supreme Court upheld the decision. Abdulbasit will spend his life in prison.

‘I wait for my daughter’

Mediyana was buried in Osh on February 9, 2022.

Soon after her funeral, Gulmayram and Talantbek sent Adilet back to Moscow, hoping the distance would be a distraction, but he would call Gulmayran every day crying.

“He is tortured inside,” Gulmayram said.

After Abdulbasit’s conviction, Gulmayram also returned to Moscow. She could not bear to stay in Osh. The agony of losing her daughter, she believes, has caused her eyesight to worsen and she suffers from a damaged nerve.

But she says the life sentence means “justice was done”.

“We keep asking ourselves: Why? Why did he have to murder her? It is just a lot to take in — why would someone bring so much violence to the life of our daughter and make her suffer that much?” asked Gulmayram, her voice heavy with grief. “What I can only do now is to pray that God will punish him. That’s it.”

Talantbek, who is usually composed, breaks down when he remembers seeing his daughter’s body in the morgue. Mediyana had looked much the same as the last time he saw her, on that Sunday morning nine days before. In her ears were the little suns he had bought her. “I bought those earrings when she was in fourth grade and she had them on her,” he reflected.

Talantbek cannot fathom that Mediyana is gone. He keeps waiting for her to return. He has left her belongings in her room untouched — her potted flowers, her Quran and her rolled prayer rug.

“I understand that I have to move these things around someday,” he said, looking into the distance. “But I can’t help it — I wait for my daughter, looking at the door and thinking maybe she will enter the house today or tomorrow.”