Russian Woman Identified After 20 Years in Spanish Cold Case

A woman whose body was found in Spain two decades ago has been identified as Russian citizen Liudmila Zavada. The cold case is part of INTERPOL’s “Identify Me” campaign, which seeks to identify women who were found dead across Europe in recent decades.

The woman, known as “The Woman in Pink,” was found on July 3, 2005, in Viladecans, a town in the province of Barcelona. She was dressed in a pink floral top, pink trousers, and pink shoes, and had been dead for less than 24 hours. Local police deemed the cause of death suspicious, as evidence suggested the body had been moved in the 12 hours preceding its discovery. Despite thorough investigations, her identity remained a mystery for two decades.

In 2024, Spanish authorities submitted the case to INTERPOL’s Identify Me campaign. The initiative involved publishing details of the case online and sharing information with the media, including images of facial reconstructions and personal belongings, in the hope that someone might recognize something. INTERPOL also shared the biometric records of the case with all its 196 member countries, with renewed calls for law enforcement to run the data through their national databases.

In 2025, police in Türkiye ran the fingerprints associated with “The Woman in Pink” through a national biometric database, resulting in a match with Russian national Liudmila Zavada, aged 31 at the time of her death. The match was subsequently confirmed through kinship DNA analysis using the DNA of one of Liudmila Zavada’s close relatives.

INTERPOL Secretary General Valdecy Urquiza expressed hope that the identification would bring closure to the victim’s family and create new leads for investigators.