The jurors found the native of Kabardino-Balkaria guilty of murdering an official in Moscow.
The jurors of the Moscow City Court, on their second attempt, found Aslan Khagundokov guilty of murdering Oleg Gvozdev, an employee of the Social Insurance Fund, in 2012. In November 2025, he was acquitted on the same charges.
As reported by "Caucasian Knot", on November 13, 2025, the Moscow City Court, based on the jury's verdict, acquitted resident of Kabardino-Balkaria Aslan Khagundokov on charges of murdering a city official in 2012. The prosecution appealed the acquittal of Khagundokov, who has been serving a 13-year sentence since 2015 for the murder of a Rostov entrepreneur.
Khagundokov's defense and relatives insist that he did not commit murders either in Rostov-on-Don or in Moscow. In 2022, a lawyer achieved the initiation of a criminal case in Kabardino-Balkaria regarding Khagundokov's abduction in September 2014. Khagundokov's sister reported that her brother was kidnapped by unknown individuals who tried to force him to confess through torture.
After the acquittal was overturned, Aslan Khagundokov's murder case (paragraph "g" of part 2 of article 105 of the Criminal Code of Russia provides for imprisonment from 8 to 20 years or life imprisonment) was sent for reconsideration.
The process began in June 2026, and the jury required 12 sessions to reach a new verdict. Seven out of eight voted for Khagundokov's guilt and found him unworthy of leniency, reports "Kommersant".
According to the prosecution's version, on November 19, 2012, Khagundokov, together with an unidentified accomplice, killed 33-year-old Oleg Gvozdev, the head of the procurement organization for state needs of the Social Insurance Fund, by inflicting several knife wounds to the heart area. The body was found in the yard of a house on Sadovaya-Spasskaya Street in central Moscow. The motive for the crime was not established by the investigation.
For more than ten years, the case was investigated against unidentified individuals. Khagundokov was only charged in July 2024: according to law enforcement, they identified him thanks to preserved recordings from surveillance cameras and genetic expertise from samples taken from gloves discarded at the crime scene.
Defense Position
Khagundokov's lawyer, Lev Dorofeev, told reporters that there is not a single direct witness in the case, and the investigation did not establish a motive for the murder of Gvozdev on the part of the defendant. The defense noted that there were motives for the murder of Gvozdev related to his activities from other individuals, and before Khagundokov's involvement in the case, the investigation considered these versions.
The defense attorney also questioned the results of the genetic expertise: the biological material from Khagundokov was collected in the colony shortly before the investigative actions involving him began, and an expert questioned during the process indirectly confirmed this. The video recording from the case materials did not capture the murder itself, the lawyer noted. The prosecutor also acknowledged the low quality of the video during the session, and the expertise that allowed the investigation to identify Khagundokov only established that the man captured by the camera has similar facial features to the defendant - nose, ear, and beard.
The retrial was conducted with violations, according to Dorofeev: the judge limited the time for the defense's speeches and rejected almost all of its motions, including those that were granted in the first trial.
The discussion of the consequences of the verdict is scheduled in the Moscow City Court for September 15, when the prosecutor will request a sentence for the defendant. "Caucasian Knot" currently has no comments from Khagundokov or the prosecution regarding the verdict.
First Case
Since 2015, Khagundokov has been serving a sentence for the murder of Rostov entrepreneur Pyotr Arzhanik and illegal trafficking of firearms (part 1 of article 105 and part 1 of article 222 of the Criminal Code of Russia). Arzhanik was shot in his own garage in the spring of 2014, and the killer arrived there on a bicycle, as recorded by a video camera. The motive for this murder was also not established.
The director of the oil company LLC "Neftekhimservice", Pyotr Arzhanik, was killed on the evening of April 21, 2014, in Rostov-on-Don. The man's body with gunshot wounds was discovered in the garage of one of the properties in the Railway District of Rostov-on-Don by his wife, who came out of the house upon hearing gunshots. The deceased had four gunshot wounds to the head.
Lawyer Dorofeev notes that his client did not resemble the person in the video recording from the scene of Arzhanik's murder, and moreover, the handwriting of the killer was different. The defense is currently seeking a review of the first case in the appellate court.
Aslan Khagundokov, a resident of the village of Argudan, is a second-group disabled person. According to his sister, during the abduction in 2014, he was beaten and tortured with electricity, but after failing to obtain a confession from him regarding the murder of Arzhanik, they left him on the outskirts of the village of Kahun, where his relatives later found him. The men had injuries on their faces, bruises, and abrasions all over their bodies, and internal organ contusions.
"When we found him after his nighttime abduction, he was in critical condition, he could not move, he had difficulty breathing, he had a traumatic brain injury, broken ribs, and traces of beatings on his body. He said that they demanded he confess to the murder. Naturally, he did not confess to anything because there was nothing to confess to," the woman said.
After recovering, Aslan Khagundokov went to Moscow, where he periodically underwent treatment for cancer. He was later detained by security forces in the capital.