Former Russian lawmaker Magomed Gadzhiyev is sentenced in absentia to life in prison for murder and corporate raiding

Dagestan’s Supreme Court has sentenced former State Duma deputy Magomed Gadzhiyev in absentia to life in a maximum-security prison for organizing a double murder and extortion, the press service of Dagestan’s courts reported. He was also fined 900,000 rubles.

Gadzhiyev’s brother, Akhmed Gadzhiyev (a former director general of the Makhachkala Sea Port and a deputy in Dagestan’s People’s Assembly), was sentenced in absentia to 10 years in prison and the same fine.

Investigators say Magomed Gadzhiyev, acting through intermediaries, arranged the murder of Maksud Sadikov, rector of the Institute of Theology, who was shot in Makhachkala on the evening of June 7, 2011. Sadikov’s nephew, who was with him, was also killed.

The Gadzhiyev brothers also plotted to seize a controlling stake in the company Sudoremont, investigators said. “Using their official and political positions, they threatened the company’s actual owner with physical violence and forced him to transfer 52% of the shares to frontmen. The damage from the corporate raiding exceeded 93 million rubles,” the court’s statement said. The Gadzhiyevs have fled the investigation, left the country, and are wanted internationally, the court noted.

Gadzhiyev served as a State Duma deputy from 2003 to 2021. He co-authored more than 300 bills, including supporting the “Dima Yakovlev Law,” which banned Americans from adopting Russian children, and the “Yarovaya Package,” which established surveillance of internet users and telephone subscribers. He also co-authored the first “foreign agents” law in 2012. After the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he provided support to the annexed DNR.

In late May 2023, Russia’s Justice Ministry declared Gadzhiyev a “foreign agent.” A Meduza source close to the Kremlin said that Gadzhiyev was declared a “foreign agent” at the initiative of the presidential administration’s political bloc and the security services, and that the decision was made after recordings of his conversations were published in Telegram channels. In them, the former deputy speaks with a certain individual who is likely cooperating with Western intelligence services. Gadzhiyev promises his interlocutor that he will share “plenty” about Russian authorities and oligarchs in exchange for a passport from one of the European countries. In addition, the former deputy admits in the recordings that he is in the United States and insists that he supports Ukraine.

A court in Makhachkala, acting on a lawsuit from the Prosecutor General’s Office, recognized Magomed Gadzhiyev and members of his family as an “extremist organization” in November 2025. The lawsuit claimed that Gadzhiyev, after the start of the war in Ukraine, left the country, where he “continued to provide financial assistance to Ukrainian paramilitary formations” and expressed readiness to “cooperate with Western intelligence services in exchange for foreign citizenship.”