On 8 February, over 2000 people came to the funeral of Abakar Kaplanov, the former head of the Novokuli village, who was killed at a police station.  

On 6 February, Kaplanov was shot dead at the police station in Makhachkala. Two fighters of the National Guard of Russia were detained on suspicion of the murder. After news of the murder went public, relatives and acquaintances of Kaplanov began to gather near the police department building where it happened. According to the reports, about 400 people gathered at the site. The Ministry of Internal Affairs of Dagestan sent additional forces to the police station. Later, the participants of the gathering moved to the morgue, where they took the body of the murdered man. 

It was also reported that shortly before the tragedy, Kaplanov met with the Russian National Guards on the street. A skirmish occurred and after which they detained Kaplanov and took him to the police station. According to the TASS agency, hostile relations between the Kurbanovs and Kaplanov arose due to a land conflict that arose during the years when he was the head of the village of Novokuli (2015-2018). “According to preliminary information, the Kurbanov brothers have repeatedly received threats from the former head of the village. In this regard, they arrived at the Soviet police department of Makhachkala to submit an application. But when trying to resolve this conflict by inviting both conflicting parties in the office of the head of the criminal investigation department, a tragedy occurred,” TASS quotes its source in law enforcement agencies. 

This information was confirmed by members of the Dagestan Public Monitoring Commission after they visited the police department and established that the application against Abakar Kaplanov from the Kurbanovs was accepted at 18:45, at 19:50 Kaplanov entered the building, and a few minutes later he was killed. According to TASS, information about the evidence of illegal transactions with land plots, committed during the years Kaplanov was the head of the village, was sent to the prosecutor's office and law enforcement agencies to initiate a criminal case against him.

The investigation of the murder in the regional department was taken over by the acting head of Dagestan Sergei Melikov. “Sergei Melikov discussed the incident with the leadership of the republic’s power structures and expressed confidence in an objective investigation of this case,” the press service for the administration of the head and government of the republic said. The head of the Dagestan department of the Investigative Committee of Russia, Anatoly Shchurov, was instructed to complete the investigation of this case within two months, as well as to give a criminal-legal assessment of the actions of employees of the internal affairs bodies. 

It should be noted that on 7 May 2019, several hundred people took part in a protest near the village of Novokuli. They stated that the families of the displaced persons could not receive land plots and demanded that the authorities take their interests into account when transferring the land ownership. The audience’s main demand was to revise the status of land intended for villagers but was later transferred to third parties who did not live in the village of Novokuli. The next day, the villagers again gathered at the entrance to Novokuli and demanded that the land issue be resolved. They explained that they demanded to return only the land allocated to people who are not migrants from the Novolaksky district, and the villagers have no claims to the land plots allocated to the migrants. Officials then ignored the gathering, protesters said.