U.S. Businesswoman Killed in Uzbekistan

MOSCOW — A Los Angeles-area woman working in a family business that imported textbooks to the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan was stabbed and killed in her apartment over the weekend. Police said Wednesday that they believe the slaying is tied to the firm’s business affairs.

Kerry Quigley, 36, a USC graduate and former Marina del Rey resident, had been working for the past few months with her brother in Tashkent, the Uzbek capital. Uzbekistan has an authoritarian government but is generally considered one of the more stable countries in Central Asia.

“She always told my mom, ‘I’m much more likely to get killed in L.A. than Tashkent,’ ” another brother, William Quigley, said Wednesday from his office in Pasadena. “She said murder was rare there.”

The killing of an American businesswoman is highly unusual in the former Soviet Union. Although business disputes have led to a sharp increase in slayings throughout the region, very few of the victims have been Westerners or women.

Quigley’s body was discovered Saturday by her brother Thomas, who had started a U.S.-Uzbek import-export company about two years ago. Police said her throat had been slashed.

The firm, Ameroz Industries, is believed to be one of the few foreign companies turning a profit in Uzbekistan. It imports textbooks and other supplies on contract for Uzbek schools, institutes and universities and has a network of affiliate offices around the country.

“It is too early to draw any conclusions, but we suspect the crime is most likely connected with the company’s financial activity,” the lead investigator, Mels I. Naimov, said in a telephone interview from Tashkent.

Other Americans who knew the pair in Tashkent said the Quigleys had received threats from a former business associate a few months ago but did not believe that they faced a serious threat. The Americans, who said they feared for their own safety, asked not to be named.

Uzbek officials vowed to solve the case, saying the crime has brought dishonor to their country. It is also likely to scare off the foreign investors Uzbek President Islam Karimov has been fervently courting.

“We consider solving this murder a matter of professional honor,” investigator Naimov said. “We are confident we will find the people responsible for inflicting this moral damage to our country.”

Kerry Quigley grew up in a family of 12 children in the Bay Area city of San Leandro but had called Los Angeles home since graduating from USC in 1984. After working in a series of banking jobs, she moved to Tashkent in January to join her brother.

“She said she’d never been happier,” William Quigley said. “She really enjoyed this kind of entrepreneurial business.”

More than 70 American companies have offices in Uzbekistan, and several hundred U.S. executives are believed to live in the country, mostly in Tashkent. Friends said Kerry Quigley was among the most prominent. She was active in community events and volunteered for charities.

Uzbekistan had generally been considered one of the most reliable Central Asian business partners, in part because of Karimov’s authoritarianism. He keeps a tight rein on the media and has cracked down on potential political opponents.

However, there have been recent signs of unrest. In February, five car bombs exploded nearly simultaneously around Tashkent, killing at least 17 people. Karimov blamed the attack on Islamic insurgents and arrested dozens of suspects.

The economy, heavily dependent on cotton, oil and natural gas, has suffered in recent years from poor harvests and the worldwide plunge in oil prices.

Social and institutional disorder after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union led to a climate in which business disputes were increasingly settled by violence. However, the surge of contract killings in the region has ebbed in the past two years.

Foreigners were rarely the target of such business-related slayings. An exception was Paul Tatum, an American hotel executive who was gunned down near his Moscow hotel in 1996.

Alexei V. Kuznetsov of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.