Moscow, April 8, 2025
Moscow Tatar Orthodox Christian Community
On the night of April 2, an Orthodox Tatar and altar server was brutally murdered in a church in Moscow.
Some are already calling Ilyas Safovich Safiullin a martyr, especially considering that he converted to Orthodoxy from Islam eight years ago.
His Holiness Patriarch Kirill expressed his condolences, reports ruskline.ru, saying that Ilyas “proved himself to be a good soldier of Christ, who sought to fulfill the Gospel preaching of active love for neighbors and to help people in need, those who are grieving, and those overwhelmed by the passion of alcohol consumption.”
The suspect, a 36-year-old Tatar citizen of Uzbekistan is a Muslim, though married to an Orthodox woman. According to the information of mk.ru, he treated his family with love and always helped those in need, but he also had a mental illness. He forgot to take his pills and started having panic attacks, so he and his wife went to his mosque in Moscow on Tuesday, April 1, but were turned away by the guards.
Then the man told his wife that he had received a message from above and suddenly ran off.
Mk.ru continues:
About the subsequent events, [the suspect] couldn’t properly tell: He claims that he doesn’t remember anything. Somehow he wandered onto the grounds of the Church of the All-Merciful Savior on Novoslobodskaya Street, where he attacked a 56-year-old laborer (who, by the way, was also Tatar by nationality) and literally slashed the unfortunate man with a knife. The criminal was detained immediately after this. As reported by the press service of the Main Investigative Department of the Investigative Committee of Russia for Moscow, a number of forensic examinations have been ordered for the case.
A source for ruskline.ru also said:
Before killing Ilyas, the murderer took off his shoes at the entrance to the church, tied our Ilyas’ hands, slit his throat, also inflicted multiple stab wounds, and then ran around the church looking for a priest, most likely looking for Fr. Andrey Nadir Yakubov, who is also an Orthodox Nizhny Novgorod Tatar, like the murdered Ilyas. At the same time, the killer was running around with an icon that he had taken from the murdered man, and was shouting some religious and political slogans.
The Moscow Tatar Orthodox Christian Community gives the killer’s name as Timur Kasymovich Khaitov.
A member of the Tatar community has written about Ilyas:
A small man in appearance, he accommodated thousands and thousands of other people in his heart, serving them in his parish—he was a missionary, an activist of the Union of Orthodox Tatars, helped the sick in hospitals, led rehabilitation groups for alcoholics and drug addicts, bringing many to Christ through these activities, performed in parish plays and, of course, carried out his main service—serving in the altar as an altar server.
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