The journey ended in a room that appeared in the investigation documents as the ceremony hall.

It was a spacious circular room with a high domed ceiling.

In the center was a shallow pool carved from a single piece of pink marble.

The water in it was heated to a temperature of 38° and had a rich reddish pink hue due to the addition of damisk rose extract and synthetic anti-coagulants substances that prevent blood clotting.

Powerful surgical lamps were placed around the perimeter of the pool directed towards the center.

The customer was already in the room, the same man who had examined Alina earlier.

He was dressed in a sterile protective suit over which he wore a traditional robe.

He did not participate in the process physically.

His role was to observe.

For him, it was an act of possession.

The highest point of consumption when a person bought for money becomes a luxury item.

Alina, completely immobilized, was lowered into the warm water of the pool.

The liquid covered her body, leaving only her face above the surface.

Muscle relaxants blocked her gag reflex and attempts to gasp for air.

So there was no panic on a physiological level, only a cold awareness of the inevitability of the end.

The pink bride ritual did not involve the recitation of spells or mystical actions.

It was a cynical name for the technological process of slaughter.

The essence of the method was to bleed the victim in warm water saturated with oils, which allowed the pores of the skin to open as much as possible and absorb the preservatives while the organism was still alive.

Death came from hypoxia and blood loss.

The specialist approaching the head of the marble bathtub used a thin surgical scalpel.

Incisions were made in the corateed artery area and on the wrists underwater so that splashes would not get on the valuable material the skin of the chest, back and thighs.

Thanks to the anti-coagulants in the water, the blood flowed out quickly and mixed evenly with the pink solution without forming clots.

Alina died in silence.

Cardiac arrest was recorded by monitors connected to sensors on her temples 12 minutes after the procedure began.

All this time, her eyes were open, fixed on the white light of the lamps and the masked figures leaning over her.

As soon as the instruments showed a flat line, the body was immediately removed from the water.

Delay was unacceptable.

Post-mortem tissue changes were beginning which could reduce the quality of the skin.

The corpse was transferred to a steel dissection table with a fluid drainage system.

Then the tanners began their work.

This was the most difficult and expensive part of the operation requiring jeweler’s precision.

A normal autopsy in a morg is performed roughly with long incisions in the middle of the torso which irrevocably damages the integrity of the canvas.

Here a technique similar to plastic surgery was used.

Incisions were made along lines that would later become seams on the bags, on the inside of the arms, on the sides, in the groin area, and on the back of the neck.

The skin was removed slowly, separating it from the subcutaneous fat tissue and muscles millimeter by millimeter.

Particular attention was paid to the area on the shoulder blade where the bird tattoo was located.

The customer requested that the design be preserved so that it could be used as the central element of the design on one of the products, a kind of mark of authenticity for the exclusive series.

The craftsmen worked together for 3 hours.

The removed skin was a single layer resembling a wet suit.

It was immediately placed in a container with a tanning solution based on chromium and plant extracts to stop decomposition and preserve the collagen structure.

The remaining body, muscles, bones, and internal organs was no longer of interest to the customer.

It became biological waste.

According to the testimony of one of the villa’s former employees, given later in exchange for a reduced sentence, Alena’s remains were packed into sealed plastic bags and transported to a crematorium located on the grounds of a private veterinary clinic owned by the holding company.

There the body was burned under the guise of disposing of the carcass of a sick thoroughbred horse.

The ashes were scattered in the desert, leaving no trace of DNA that could be found by random search teams.

Meanwhile, in an underground workshop set up in the same basement, the skin began to be processed.

This process took 2 weeks.

Human skin is thinner and more elastic than cowhide, but more difficult to process.

It requires more delicate chemicals.

The craftsman used ancient tanning recipes used to make lambkin gloves, but with the addition of modern synthetic fixitives.

Alina’s skin was bleached to remove cadaavver spots and uneven pigmentation, then dyed a delicate cream beige color, which was listed in the order catalog as nude alabaster.

The tattoo on the piece of leather retained its colors, becoming the only bright spot on the pale background.

Three medium-sized women’s tote bags, one men’s belt, and two wallets were cut and sewn from the resulting material.

The accessories for the items were made of white gold and encrusted with small rubies symbolizing drops of blood.

On the inside of each item, on a red velvet lining, the workshop’s stamp and serial number were embossed, one of six.

There were no maiden tags or information about the composition.

Buyers of such items do not ask questions about their origin.

They pay for uniqueness and the awareness that they own something forbidden, something that once breathed.

The first bag, the one with a fragment of a bird tattoo on the front flap, remained with the shake.

He placed it in a special display case in his office next to his collection of rare antique weapons.

The rest of the items were packed in Blackwood gift boxes and sent by courier service to trusted business partners in Europe and Asia as New Year’s gifts.

It was a sign of special trust, an invitation to a closed club where human life is just a resource.

While the craftsman polished the gold clasps on Alena’s leather bags, her mother in Kiev began to sound the alarm.

3 weeks had passed since the last call.

Her daughter’s phone was turned off and her messages remained unread.

Her mother went to the police, but they were reluctant to take her statement.

The local inspector, a tired man with a pile of papers on his desk, said bluntly, “She went to Dubai to work as a model,” “Woman, you understand what they do there.

She went out partying, found a rich sponsor, and is too embarrassed to call.

She’ll show up in a month with money.

” No criminal case was opened and the police limited themselves to formally registering the missing person report.

However, Alena’s mother did not give up.

She found the contact details of the Golden Sands Agency on behalf of which Alina had been recruited.

The agency’s website looked professional, but when she tried to call the London number provided, the answering machine said that the number did not exist.

Emails were returned with a delivery error.

The woman began posting on social media in groups of Ukrainian immigrants in the Emirates begging for help.

Her posts with a photo of Alina and a request for anyone who had seen her in Dubai to respond began to spread across the internet.

This created the very information noise that the organizers of the business had been trying to avoid.

The security department of the Al-Malik Invest holding company recorded a surge in online activity related to the name Alina Sokalova.

Reputation monitoring algorithms issued a red level warning.

Clare received a notification on her encrypted phone.

The problem needed to be solved.

The simple disappearance of a person looked suspicious, especially against the backdrop of her mother’s active search.

A cover story was needed that would close the case once and for all.

A tragedy that would look natural and did not imply the presence of a body.

On December 14th, a month and a half after the murder, Alena’s mother received a call.

It was the Ukrainian consul in Dubai.

His voice was mournful and formal.

He reported that the Dubai police had completed their investigation into the incident that had occurred in the waters of the Persian Gulf.

According to the report, a group of tourists had rented a yacht for deep sea diving.

During the dive, a storm began and one of the girls was swept away by a strong underwater current.

Despite a week-long search by the Coast Guard, the body was not found, but personal belongings and documents in the name of Alina Sookova were found on board the yacht.

The consul expressed his condolences and said that an official death certificate would be sent by mail.

For the family, it was a devastating blow.

Her mother was hospitalized with a heart attack.

Her brother dropped out of school to care for her.

They believed the official version because they were presented with an internationally recognized document bearing official seals.

No one could have imagined that at that very moment, while the mother was mourning her drowned daughter, part of Alina was at a social event in Paris, hanging on the shoulder of the wife of a major oil magnate as an elegant cream colored accessory.

The legend was perfect, except for one detail.

Alena’s belongings, allegedly found on the yacht, were not handed over to the police immediately, but 2 days after the storm.

And among these belongings was a cell phone, the very one that had been taken from her on the first day.

The holding company’s security specialists wiped its memory, deleting all calls and photos.

But they made a technical mistake.

They did not take into account that the phone was synchronized with cloud storage, the password for which Alena’s brother knew.

When the phone was turned on on the yacht to create the appearance of its presence there, it caught the network for a second and sent an automatic geo tag to the cloud.

Alina’s brother, trying to find at least some recent photos of his sister, logged into her account a month after the funeral, which in fact did not take place.

An empty coffin was buried.

He saw that the phone’s last activity was recorded not at sea, nor in the port where the yacht was supposedly morowed.

The geoloccation point indicated coordinates deep in the desert, 70 km from the coastline in a place that was marked on Google Maps as private property, no trespassing.

This discrepancy became the crack in the dam of lies through which the truth would soon pour out.

As a technical college student, the young man understood that GPS data was difficult to falsify and that a phone could not accidentally be off by 70 km.

He began his own amateur investigation comparing dates.

The official date of death was December 12th, but the geo tag from the desert was dated October 14th, the day Alina arrived, and the next tag appeared only in December at the port.

Where was the phone for 2 months? And why did it go silent in that particular spot in the desert? He took screenshots, printed out maps, and instead of going to the police, who had already turned him away once, he wrote a letter to a journalist from an independent European publication who specialized in investigating human trafficking in Eastern Europe.

The journalist, whose name was Thomas, was initially skeptical about the letter from the Ukrainian student.

Hundreds of such stories about models sold into slavery come in.

But he was intrigued by the geoloccation detail.

He checked the coordinates.

It was not just a shed in the desert.

It was a huge fencedin complex that was not listed in any tourist registry, but consumed as much electricity as a small factory.

Thomas decided to dig deeper and discovered that the land belonged to a front company involved in leather and textile logistics.

A strange coincidence for a residence in the desert.

He initiated a request through his sources at Interpol to check if there were any other signals from that square.

The answer came a week later and was shocking.

Over the past 5 years, signals from four other phones belonging to girls from Muldova, Russia, and Bellarus, who are still missing, had briefly appeared from that area.

The case ceased to be a family tragedy and began to take on the proportions of a serial death conveyor belt.

Journalist Thomas Anderson, who specializes in investigating organized crime, arrived in Dubai on January 20th under the guise of a logistics consultant.

With the geoloccation data provided by Alina’s brother and a list of missing girls from Eastern Europe in hand, he understood that a direct confrontation with the local police at this stage would only lead to his deportation and the concealment of evidence.

Thomas chose a strategy of financial pressure.

Through his sources in European banking structures, he tracked the transactions of Al-Malik Invest.

It turned out that this holding company, officially engaged in real estate, regularly received transfers from closed auction houses in Europe marked for art and antiques.

However, not a single painting or sculpture passed through customs.

Instead, the customs declarations contained codes corresponding to the export of exotic animal leather products in small quantities.

Comparing the dates of the girl’s disappearances with the dates of shipment, the journalist discovered a direct correlation.

Each time, 3 to four weeks after the phone of the next model stopped connecting to the network in the area of the deserted villa, the company sent a parcel weighing 2 to 3 kg by courier to Paris, London or Hong Kong.

Thomas contacted Europole and provided them with the dossier he had compiled.

The key argument was the likelihood that citizens of European Union countries could also be involved in the purchase of human skin products which fell under the jurisdiction of international conventions on human trafficking and desecration of the bodies of the deceased.

The case was given priority status as the scandal threatened to cause irreparable damage to diplomatic relations.

On February 5th, after confirmation of satellite intelligence data, which recorded heat signatures characteristic of industrial furnaces on the villa’s territory, the Dubai prosecutor’s office was forced to issue a search warrant.

The operation was carried out by special forces to prevent information leaks.

Early in the morning of February 8th, armored vehicles blocked the perimeter of the residence.

The villa’s security guards did not resist, following instructions not to engage in combat with state forces.

During the raid, the mansion was occupied by manager Clare Miller, Dr. Hassan, and several technical staff members.

The owner of the villa, Shik Abdullah al- Malik, was absent, attending business negotiations in the city center.

During an initial inspection of the living quarters, the task force found nothing suspicious except for locked rooms in the relaxation area, which were empty and thoroughly cleaned with chlorine.

However, technical specialists discovered a hidden elevator leading to the second basement level.

It was there that investigators found evidence that turned the case of a missing person into a case of serial murders of particular cruelty.

The basement was a fullyfledged production workshop.

In one of the rooms, equipped as an operating room, forensic experts found traces of biological fluids in the drains of a marble bathtub.

A rapid test confirmed the presence of human hemoglobin.

The adjacent room housed a leather workshop.

On the tables were patterns, knives for scraping leather, and chemical reagents.

But the main find was a log book of finished products kept by CLA.

It described the parameters of the source material in dry bureaucratic language.

Sample number four, age 26, light skin, no defects, tattoo on shoulder blade, preserved upon request.

Shik Abdullah al-Malik was arrested in his office 2 hours after the raid began.

While searching his private office, detectives found a cream colored women’s handbag on a shelf among his collection of weapons.

A fragment of a bird tattoo was clearly visible on the front flap of the bag.

The item was seized and sent to the forensic laboratory.

DNA analysis carried out within 48 hours showed a 100% match with genetic material taken from Alina Sokova’s mother.

This became irrefutable proof that the bag was made from the skin of the murdered girl.

The trial began on May 1st and was held behind closed doors due to the extreme cruelty of the details of the case.

Seven people were in the dock.

The shake himself, manager Clare Miller, Dr. Hassan, two orderlys, and two master leather workers.

The defense strategy was based on attempting to shift all the blame onto Clare Miller, claiming that the shake was unaware of the origin of the material and believed he was purchasing exclusive synthetic leather.

However, Clare realizing that she was facing the death penalty, made a deal with the prosecution.

She provided audio recordings of conversations with the customer in which he personally discussed the design of future products and demanded special softness of the material, referring to previous batches.

During the investigation, it was discovered that the pink bride ritual had been performed at the villa for 9 years.

11 girls from the CIS and Eastern Europe became victims of the purification.

Their bodies were destroyed and their skin was used to create 50 items of habeddasherie which were given as gifts to high-ranking officials around the world.

Interpol initiated a secret operation to seize these items.

Most of the owners voluntarily surrendered their bags and belts, claiming they had no idea about their origin to avoid charges of complicity.

The verdict was announced on August 15th.

The court found all the defendants guilty of premeditated murder, human trafficking, and desecration of the bodies of the deceased.

Shik Abdullah al- Malik and Dr. Hassan were sentenced to death by firing squad.

The sentence against a member of an influential family was unprecedented and was intended to demonstrate the state’s zero tolerance for such crimes.

Clare Miller received a life sentence without the right to parole.

The other members of the criminal group received sentences ranging from 25 to 30 years in prison.

Alina Soalovva’s mother refused the monetary compensation offered by the defendant’s lawyers.

The only thing she demanded was to have her daughter returned to her, but there was nothing to return.

The court ruled that all items made from human skin should be cremated as they were considered biological remains.

On September 20th, in the presence of the Ukrainian consul and relatives, the bag with the bird tattoo was burned in a special furnace.

The ern with the ashes was given to the mother.

She buried it in a Kiev cemetery next to an empty grave dug a year ago.

Alina Sakuliva’s story did not become the plot for a Hollywood movie and quickly disappeared from the headlines of the world media, replaced by political news.

The villa in the desert was confiscated by the state and demolished by bulldozers.

Only sand remained in its place.

However, in the narrow circles of collectors of rare items, rumors still circulate that not all items from the collection were found and destroyed.

They say that somewhere in a private storage facility in Hong Kong or London, there is still a belt or wallet made of unnaturally soft, pale leather, which is more valuable than gold.

Because its price is a human

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