The judges specifically noted that the spiritual shell with which the defendants attempted to justify their actions did not negate the fact that serious crimes against the person had been committed.

As a result, all 15 men were found guilty on most of the charges.

The leaders of the group, including master, received the maximum sentence, while the others received long prison terms, in some cases with subsequent restrictions on any public activity.

The maximum sentences were carried out after appeals within the time limits established by law.

Official reports limited themselves to a brief statement about the commission of particularly serious crimes related to human trafficking, violence, and prohibited practices.

The fate of the girls after sentencing varied.

The state in which the complex was located decided to repatriate them to their countries of origin in consultation with the relevant embassies and consulates.

Before departure, they underwent treatment and psychological rehabilitation in specialized centers.

Some were provided with temporary housing and assistance in restoring their documents.

International human rights organizations included them in programs to support victims of human trafficking, helping with treatment, legal advice, and job searches.

However, even with formal assistance, the consequences of their experiences did not disappear.

Psychologists noted that many of the girls had long-term sleep problems, panic attacks, difficulty trusting people, especially men, and complex relationships with family issues given the loss of children born in the underground complex.

In several cases, relatives did not fully understand the scale of what had happened or preferred not to talk about it, which intensified the victim’s feelings of isolation.

Attempts to find the children who had been taken from the underground complex yielded limited results.

Investigators traced some of the money and found several families who had adopted babies through opaque schemes.

But the lack of official birth documents, fake certificates, and the use of front men made the task virtually impossible.

It was difficult to legally prove the connection between a specific child and a specific mother without genetic testing, which the new guardians did not agree to.

As a result, reports noted that several children were likely living in wealthy families in different countries, but their identities and locations were not disclosed.

Information about the existence of this group and the underground complex was not widely disseminated for a long time within the country.

The authorities limited themselves to brief statements and were reluctant to disclose details to the public.

The bulk of the information became known outside the region thanks to human rights activists and lawyers involved in the case who passed the materials on to colleagues in Europe.

These documents were later used as the basis for journalistic investigations and documentary projects, but their distribution in many Middle Eastern countries was blocked on formal grounds.

For experts involved in combating human trafficking, this case became an example of how a combination of financial resources, a closed elite, and pseudospiritual ideology can create a sustainable system of violence that is virtually invisible to outside observers.

For the surviving girls, this will remain a personal story that will rarely be heard publicly.

Most of them prefer not to recall the details and to build a new life as far as possible, away from the part of the world where they were once declared sacred vessels and deprived of their right to be simply human beings.

Three exclusive cream colored handbags and one men’s belt found during a search of a private villa turned out to be made not from calf skin, but from the skin of a 26-year-old Ukrainian citizen.

DNA testing confirmed that the material used to make these accessories belonged to Alina Sokova, who was officially listed as missing after an accident on the water.

Alina Sokalovva lived in a residential area of Kiev in an old pre-fabricated high-rise building where the elevator broke down every week and the hot water was turned off for the entire summer.

She lived with her mother and younger brother who had just entered college.

The family was desperately short of money.

Her mother worked as a nurse and earned a pittance which was barely enough to buy food.

Her father left the family 10 years ago and did not help in any way.

Alina tried to support her family on her own.

She was not a professional top model featured in magazines.

She earned extra money by modeling for cheap clothing cataloges, standing at promotional events in supermarkets, and sometimes appearing as an extra in music videos.

It was hard work for little pay.

Loans for household appliances and debts for the apartment were growing like a snowball.

Debt collectors began calling in the evenings, threatening legal action.

It was at this moment of despair that a woman wrote to Alina on Instagram.

The woman’s profile looked expensive and respectable.

Her name was Victoria and she introduced herself as a scout for the Dubai modeling agency Golden Sands.

The message said that Alina was the perfect type for working at private events in the Emirates.

Victoria suggested meeting to discuss the details.

The meeting took place not in an office, but in the lobby of an expensive hotel in the city center.

Victoria arrived with a folder of documents and a tablet.

She got straight to the point without wasting time on small talk.

The job consisted of simply attending parties of wealthy people, smiling, keeping up the conversation, and adding glamour to the evening.

No intimacy, strictly hostessing and modeling.

The salary was $5,000 a month net, plus accommodation, meals, and flights.

For Alina, $5,000 was an amount she couldn’t earn in Kiev in a year.

Victoria put the contract on the table.

It was thick in English with a Russian translation.

There were many clauses about penalties for being late and violating the dress code, but the most important one was about complete confidentiality.

Models were prohibited from posting stories, taking selfies at work, or revealing who was at the party and where it was taking place.

Victoria explained it simply.

The clients were shakes and big businessmen, and they didn’t want any gossip in the press.

Alina skimmed through the text.

She didn’t understand many of the legal terms, but the figure of $5,000 in the payment column overshadowed all her doubts.

She signed the contract without even consulting a lawyer.

She felt like she had won the lottery and would now save her family from poverty.

Before the trip, she had to undergo a medical examination.

Victoria sent Alina not to a regular clinic, but to a private medical center.

The doctor, a man in his 50s with cold hands, behaved strangely.

He barely listened to her heart or measured her blood pressure.

Instead, he examined Alena’s skin very carefully and at length.

He asked her to undress completely and shown a special lamp on her back, hips, and stomach.

He measured the distance between her moles with a tape measure, felt her skin for elasticity, and recorded information about any scars.

Alina asked why such a thorough examination of her skin was necessary.

The doctor replied curtly without looking up that the sun was very hot in the Emirates and the agency had to be sure that the model would not have problems with pigmentation or allergies.

It sounded logical and Alina calmed down.

The doctor stamped her fit certificate.

On October 14th, Alina flew out of Borisville.

She told her mother that she was going to work at a diamond exhibition and would be living in a hotel with other girls.

Her brother asked her to bring him a new phone and Alina promised to buy it with her first paycheck.

She was met at the airport in Dubai.

It was not a taxi, but a huge black SUV with tinted windows.

The driver in a white shirt silently took her suitcase and opened the door.

Alina sat down in the cool interior, expecting to see the skyscrapers and lights of the big city she had read so much about, but the car drove in the other direction.

They turned onto a wide highway, and half an hour later, the city lights were behind them.

All around was the darkness of the desert.

Alina tapped on the partition between the seats and asked the driver where they were going.

The driver replied in broken English that he was taking her to the company owner’s villa for a briefing and then to a hotel.

Alina tensed up but decided not to panic prematurely.

An hour later, the car turned off the highway onto a narrow road leading to a high fence.

The fence was made of stone 4 m high with barbed wire on top.

The gate opened and the jeep drove inside.

The territory was huge but empty.

No parties, no music.

In the middle of the courtyard stood a large white house resembling a palace but somehow uninhabited, too quiet.

At the entrance, she was met by a woman named Clare.

She was European, dressed in a strict business suit.

Clare did not smile.

She said immediately, “Welcome to the residence.

Hand over your phone and passport.

Alina was surprised and asked why.

Clare replied harshly that it was a security rule.

Very important people live here and no gadgets are allowed.

The passport is needed to register the visa.

Alina feeling uncomfortable under the gaze of the security guards handed over her phone and documents.

Clare promised that she would give her a work phone in the morning for communication.

Alina was taken to her room.

The room was luxurious, marble floors, a huge bed, expensive furniture, but the windows did not open and the door was locked from the outside as soon as Alina entered.

She was told to rest.

Alina was woken up early in the morning.

Two maids entered the room and brought breakfast and strange clothes.

A long white shirt made of natural silk similar to a hoodie.

Alina never saw her jeans and t-shirt again.

Clare came in after them and said that the work began with preparing her appearance.

Alina was taken to another wing of the house.

It smelled of dampness and flowers, a very strong cloying scent of roses.

She was led into a room lined with pink marble.

In the middle of the room stood a bathtub filled with murky pink water.

Claire said it was a special bath with oils to moisturize the skin.

Alina had to lie in it for 2 hours three times a day.

The first few days Alina tried to ask about work, about exhibitions, about when she would go to the city.

Clare replied monoselabically.

Soon, first we need to make you look perfect.

The food they brought Alina was strange.

It was mostly liquid soups and herbal flavored smoothies.

After eating, Alina felt very weak and sleepy.

Her head felt heavy.

Her thoughts were confused.

She wanted to sleep all the time.

She stopped worrying about the door being locked.

She didn’t care anymore.

She just lay on the bed, stared at the ceiling, and waited for someone to come and take her to the bathroom.

After a week, Alina noticed changes.

Her skin became very pale and soft like a baby’s.

But it was not a healthy softness.

Her skin became thin, and her veins showed through it.

Any touch was painful.

The water in the bath stung more and more each time.

The smell of roses, which at first seemed pleasant, now made her nauseous.

Clare came everyday, examined Elina, touched her hands and back, nodded to herself, and left.

Once Alina saw another girl in the corridor.

She was being led by two guards.

The girl could barely move her legs, her eyes were glassy, and she was looking through the walls.

She was wearing the same white robe.

Alina wanted to shout to her to ask what was going on, but her tongue wouldn’t obey her.

She felt as if she were in a fog.

On the 10th day, Alina was brought to an office.

A man in traditional Arab clothing was sitting there.

It was not the doctor who had examined her in Kiev, nor was it the driver.

It was the owner.

He was sitting at a table drinking tea.

Clare placed Alina in the center of the room and took off her robe.

Alina stood naked, shivering from cold and fear, but the drugs in her food suppressed her panic.

The man stood up, walked over to her, and ran his finger along her shoulder.

He didn’t look at her face.

He only looked at her skin.

He said something in Arabic and Clare translated.

The material is ready.

The quality is excellent.

We can begin the purification stage.

The purification stage turned out to be hell.

The baths were different now.

Something burning was added to the water.

Alina cried when she sat down in the water, but the guards held her there by force.

Her skin burned.

After the bath, they smeared her with thick ointments that froze the pain but made her body feel even more alien.

Alina realized that these were not spa treatments.

They were preparing her for something terrible.

In rare moments of clarity, when the effects of the drugs weakened a little, she tried to find a way out.

She knocked on the door, but no one opened it.

There were no windows at all in her new room in the basement.

only the ventilation hummed under the ceiling.

One night, she woke up to the sound of someone screaming.

The scream was distant, muffled by thick walls, but full of horror.

It wasn’t just a scream.

It was the howl of an animal being killed.

Alina huddled in the corner of the bed, covering her ears with her hands.

She realized that it was the girl she had seen in the hallway who was screaming.

In the morning, Clare came with a new batch of cocktails.

She was cheerful, which was rare.

She said, “Today is a great day.

Today, your transformation will begin.

You will become part of eternity.

” Alina looked at her and asked, “Where is that girl, the blonde?” Clare smiled with her lips, her eyes remaining cold.

She has already fulfilled her destiny.

She has become beautiful.

Alina was no longer fed solid food at all, only water with pink syrup.

She had become so weak that she could not get out of bed without help.

Her body had become almost transparent.

The tattoo on her shoulder blade, a small bird she had gotten when she was 18, became bright, as if drawn with a marker on paper.

Clare brought special tools, scrapers.

The maids began to scrape Alina’s skin everyday, removing the top layer of dead cells.

It didn’t hurt because of the ointments, but it was scary.

They polished her, like polishing wood before varnishing.

Alina was turning into a thing.

She was still breathing.

Her heart was still beating.

But to these people, she was already just an expensive piece of leather.

One day, three men entered her room.

They were not doctors or guards.

They were dressed in aprons like butchers or tanners.

One of them was carrying a briefcase with tools.

They silently examined Alina, discussing her as if she were not there.

One of them took her by the hand, turned her around, looked at her elbow, then at her tattoo.

He clicked his tongue in dissatisfaction when he saw the bird and said in English, “The design will have to be cut off or worked around in the cut.

” Alina understood.

They were not talking about her as a person.

They were talking about her as a piece of fabric for sewing.

The preparation process was completed on November 4th, exactly 3 weeks after Alina’s arrival in the United Arab Emirates.

According to data recovered from the servers of a private security company serving the perimeter of the estate on that day, a gray minivan without identification marks entered the territory delivering equipment classified in customs declarations as tools for processing organic materials.

Inside was a team of two specialists whose identities the investigation was only able to establish months later.

They were former employees of the pathology department of a private clinic in Eastern Europe, hired on contract through a chain of front companies.

Their task was not to treat patients, but to professionally extract biological material while preserving its integrity and aesthetic properties.

Alena’s morning began not with her usual intake of liquid food, but with a complete refusal of food and water.

This was standard pre-operative practice necessary to ensure that dehydration made the skin denser and drier which facilitated subsequent processing.

Clare, the personnel manager, entered the room accompanied by two orderlys.

Alina was given an injection of a powerful muscle relaxant mixed with a seditive.

The substance took effect instantly.

The girl’s consciousness remained relatively clear.

She could see and hear what was happening, but she completely lost control of her motor functions.

Her muscles relaxed to such an extent that she could not even move a finger or close her eyelids.

Her body turned into a heavy, unresponsive object, which the orderlys transferred to a stretcher and covered with a white sheet.

Alina was wheeled down long corridors in the basement, the existence of which she had been unaware of.

The walls here were lined with white tiles, and the air was saturated with the smell of ozone and sterilizing solutions, reminiscent of the smell of an operating room.

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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