A Ufa Couple's Murder: The Search for a Missing Pair and Their Killers' Fates

23-year-old Ufa native Karim G. gave his businessman father every reason to be proud. He had successfully graduated from high school, studied at a petroleum university, worked as an engineer at a research institute, and was already considered an inventor, having patented several developments.

And he had a good girlfriend — Elena M., the 20-year-old daughter of a top manager of a state pharmacy chain, who ran the largest production pharmacy in the republic. She herself was studying at the Institute of Law at Bashkir State University (now Ufa University of Science and Technology) in the criminalistics department.

On the evening of Thursday, 31 January, Karim said he was going to meet his girlfriend and left home in his new Honda Accord. Closer to midnight, his mother grew worried: it was late, her son hadn«t returned, and he wasn»t answering calls. Lena was also unreachable. By morning, their families realized something terrible had happened.

The parents went to the police, the friends combed the area where the couple might have gone, and began posting flyers around the city offering a reward for help in the search. A few days later, Karim«s father received a call from an unknown man who asked how much he was willing to pay to see his son alive again.

By that time, specialists from the Ministry of Internal Affairs were already tracking calls to the missing couple«s parents. They established that the number was registered to a member of a gang operating in one of the rural districts of Bashkortostan. The businessman went to meet the caller but had coordinated all his actions with law enforcement in advance.

They monitored the situation and managed to detain the criminal. However, he turned out not to be the gangster to whom the number was registered, but an ordinary unemployed man who had bought the phone second-hand in some slot machine club months earlier and, without even changing the SIM card, decided to cash in on Karim and Elena«s disappearance.

The trail to the real kidnappers was found a couple of weeks later. Detectives received information from resellers at the Ufa car market. Two men were trying to sell a Honda matching the description from the police bulletin, offering it at a heavily discounted price because they «urgently needed money». One of them, 28-year-old Yevgeny F., left his phone number for contact.

He had already been convicted of theft and fraud and was released in 2006. The suspect could not be found quickly because he was drifting between friends and acquaintances. But at the same time, police continued to search for Karim«s car and found it in one of the courtyards, where they set up an ambush and finally detained the car thief. It was the same Yevgeny, and he was wearing the jeans and jacket of the Honda»s true owner.

The detainee did not deny it, admitting he had taken the clothes from Karim. According to Yevgeny, on 31 January, he and his friend nicknamed «Nemets» (The German) saw that a car with a young couple was stuck in the snow near the embankment, helped them get out, and asked for a ride to the Monument of Friendship.

But once inside the car, Nemets pulled out a pistol and, threatening to kill, handcuffed Karim and moved him to the back seat. He then took the wheel and, together with Yevgeny, drove the couple to a wasteland behind garages in the Shaksha district. There, the kidnapped pair were killed, their bodies hidden in a storage unit, and their car, documents, and clothes were taken.

«Nemets», a nickname he got due to his distinctive surname, was 27-year-old Vladimir Sh. After serving in Chechnya, he worked for a security agency, was married, and was raising a young daughter. He shared a passion for gambling with the previously convicted Yevgeny. Both spent so much time in front of slot machines that they fell into debt and were desperately in need of money.

Learning that his accomplice had been detained, Nemets went to an acquaintance in the Ryazan region, where he got a job as a store security guard. However, detectives traced who he had called before fleeing Bashkortostan, determined his location, arrived to apprehend him, and took him back to his home region to stand trial.

The pistol with which Nemets threatened Karim and Elena was not a real firearm but a gas pistol. According to the arrested man, he took it from the house of an acquaintance—lawyer Marat M., who was the brother of a judge in one of the districts of Bashkortostan. Supposedly, the lawyer himself handed over the «tool» to help them get money.

«Yevgeny F. said a pistol was necessary, as going for a robbery with just a knife would be unserious. He told me to ask Marat M. for a gas pistol. Marat said he would give it, but on the condition that we not fire it, but use it as a threatening object,» Vladimir Sh. told the court, as follows from the materials of the Supreme Court of Bashkortostan.

Nemets claimed that immediately after the kidnapping, he, his accomplice, and their still-living victims drove to the lawyer«s house, and he went inside to assure him they would soon pay for his help. Marat denied guilt and insisted that the accusations from Yevgeny and Vladimir could not be trusted, as they could have implicated him to ease their own punishment.

According to the lawyer caught up in the scandal, his gambling-addicted friends did not tell him of their plans, and they took the pistol without asking. While he fought off the accusations, his brother was denied election to the position of justice of the peace in Ufa. The rejection was linked only to that one year, but the exact reason was not specified in the resolution.

Be that as it may, Marat M. proved that he did not and could not have known that his friends planned to kidnap and kill anyone, but he was still convicted of aiding and abetting and sentenced to 4.5 years in a standard-regime penal colony. He insisted that the witnesses who testified against him contradicted even each other.

Yevgeny first said that the idea for the robbery arose when he and Vladimir were at the lawyer«s house, but later began to claim there had been no plan. As he explained, you can»t know in advance that you«ll come across a stuck car. Yevgeny also stated that it was Nemets who finished off both the young man and the girl. But Nemets only admitted to killing Karim.

The files of the Supreme Court of Russia contain an appeal from Yevgeny requesting an investigative experiment, which he believed would confirm his version of events.

«We had no prior agreement to commit a robbery and murder, no intent to seize the victim»s car. I did not kill Elena M. The victim could only have been killed by Vladimir Sh., who was sitting behind her,« declared Yevgeny F.

The judicial panel agreed with some of his arguments, but this only allowed for a slight reduction from the initially imposed 25-year sentence in a strict-regime correctional colony. The essence of the case did not change overall: Nemets did the kidnapping, but both men robbed the victims, and each had one death on their conscience.

Vladimir Sh. received a lesser but also «strict-regime» sentence — 19 years and 10 months. He served his sentence, as UFA1.RU found out, in Colony No. 4 in the Saratov region, located in the city of Pugachyov. This penal colony drew media attention in 2024 due to an inmate riot.

«Prison staff wanted to take a prohibited item from a local inmate authority. The inmate demonstratively swore at the guards and, making threats, told them where to go. For this uncultured behavior, the unruly convict was restrained, with his arms twisted behind his back. Other repeat offenders saw this and began smashing windows and doors in the unit in protest. But the guards called them to order with the help of an »explanatory conversation,« reported our colleagues from the Saratov portal 164.RU.

But the Ufa «Nemets» was no longer there by that time. In August 2022, he applied to a local court with a request to be transferred to a settlement colony. The prisoner noted that he was characterized positively by the institution«s administration and had been repeatedly rewarded »for his conscientious attitude to work«.

The court refused, but later Nemets«s relatives reported his death. Vladimir Sh. is buried at the Northern Cemetery in Ufa and, judging by the dates on the grave, died three months after his petition.

«You will always remain in my heart! May the earth be soft upon you,» Vladimir«s brother wrote on his page on VKontakte.

UFA1.RU contacted the deceased«s family to find out what happened to him, but received no response at the time of publication. If Vladimir»s loved ones deem it necessary to reveal details about his fate, we will publish their account on the website.

We also found a social media page of a person with the name, surname, and date of birth matching Yevgeny F.«s. It features several photos vaguely resembling his appearance, but after so many years, it is impossible to determine from photos alone if it is him. We sent a message to the profile owner, but he did not respond. If we manage to contact Yevgeny or if he himself wants to tell his story, UFA1.RU will publish the details.

On 1 February 2025, Elena M.«s father died — exactly 17 years to the day after her murder. He is buried at the Southern Cemetery. His daughter rests in the same place — next to Karim. On their shared headstone, a line from a DDT song is engraved: »The dead dreams of spring.«

Read about other high-profile crimes from various years in Bashkortostan in the crime section of UFA1.RU. In previous installments, we told how the investigation ended into the case of two female students found dead near the Muslim Cemetery. We also recommend reading about a Ufa hockey player who, in the 1990s, before a potential move to the NHL, was shot by a criminal authority.