Career
After retiring from the sport, he was running to become the head of the Kyrgyz Olympic Committee, recently vacated after the murder of Bayaman Erkinbayev the previous September. But on January 8, 2006, while Sanatbayev was getting out of a car near a shopping center, two men attacked him, with one shooting him in the head He died in the hospital.
Aldoyar Ismankulov, the National Security Service chief for organized crime, was arrested for the murder within a few weeks, then released and eventually acquitted.
Two other suspects were arrested on February 2. But finally on April 16, it was announced that Kuban Jodoshev, who was allegedly responsible for seven murders including Sanatbayev"s, was killed during a special police operation in Bishkek.
Sanatbayev had been outspoken in his criticism of fellow-candidate, Ryspek Akmatbaev, former boxer, businessman, and the head of the Kyrgyzstan Fencing Federation, who was at the time on trial for murder, later acquitted.