In the fall of 2022, Seda Suleimanova fled Chechnya for St. Petersburg to avoid being forced into an arranged marriage, as her older sisters were. She was forcibly returned in August 2023 -- and promptly disappeared.A rights group that helped her escape Chechnya believes she was killed that November and buried "like a dog" on a roadside in her native village of Alkhan-Yurt.Such a fate is not so unusual: Known for rampant rights abuses under longtime Kremlin-backed leader Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya has seen a surge in "funerary repression," or posthumous humiliation, activists say.Authorities use the denial of customary burial rites to target, posthumously, those who challenge power or deviate from strict social norms enforced from above in the deeply conservative, mostly Muslim region. Women who flee their families and LGBT people appear to be most at risk.After Suleimanova fled Chechnya, she lived in St. Petersburg and found work as a barista. But she wasn't safe there. Her brother tracked her down in February 2023; security camera footage from her workplace shows him berating her for bringing "shame" upon the family and demanding to know her address.Suleimanova fled out a back door at the time, but police came to the apartment where she was living with her partner, Stanislav Kudryavtsev, in August 2023, detained them, and told her she was suspected of stealing jewelry in Chechnya. Suleimanova was then taken to Chechnya.Kudryavtsev, who converted to Islam in hopes of marrying her, was unable to find her.In September 2023, Chechen authorities issued a video showing Suleimanova, looking frightened and meek, with the regional human rights ombudsman, who says she is happy to be close to family and has no complaints. She did not speak in the video, and no information on her whereabouts was released. She was never seen in public again.