Rasul Gulmamedov. Photo from turkmen.news
In Turkmenistan, a notorious criminal inmate, the Baloch Rasul Gulmamedov, nicknamed «Bin Laden,» has died in a maximum-security correctional colony. The news was reported by turkmen.news.
Gulmamedov was serving his sentence in facility AN-K/3, located in the Ovadan-Depe area, adjacent to the prison of the same name. He died on April 10, 2026, just weeks before his 55th birthday. The official cause of death was listed as a heart attack.
Gulmamedov earned his nickname after Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. He was arrested in the mid-1990s; a search of his home turned up a large cache of drugs, an arsenal of weapons including assault rifles and machine guns — and an armored personnel carrier. The APC had been buried in a pit dug in the yard and concealed under straw.
According to one account, «Bin Laden» obtained the weapons and military hardware by trading drugs with Soviet officers withdrawing from Afghanistan in 1989. Others dismiss this as a legend fabricated by security services to inflate the case. Gulmamedov himself managed to flee at the time and settled in one of the former Soviet republics, but returned home in 2001, where he was detained and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Gulmamedov was held not only in colony AN-K/3: he passed through the Ovadan-Depe prison (facility AH-T/2) on at least three separate occasions.
«Bin Laden» was one of the so-called otritsaly — inmates who refuse to comply with prison rules and regulations and decline to perform assigned work. The colony administration preferred to leave Gulmamedov alone and turn a blind eye to his special status. The reason was simple: his sway over other convicted Baloch was such that he could mobilize several hundred inmates and trigger a full-scale riot.
Thanks to this leverage, Gulmamedov enjoyed conditions that were lavish by prison standards. He was permitted to live in a keldyome — a separate cell with amenities — and was attended by inmates who served as personal helpers. He also had unrestricted access to visits and food parcels.
*Al-Qaeda is designated a terrorist organization in Russia and Uzbekistan.
