In arts-rich Petersburg, Russia, she developed a passion for fine art and other classic culture. She loved attending opera and became an enthusiastic collector of vinyl records that remain stacked high in a room of the family home. Her passion to foreign languages later extended to English, Chinese, some French, Korean and Japanese, apart from her native Mongolian, and was the basis her globetrotting, translating career.

“It’s my fault to I let her study so much. Her life would have been different if she had just remained in Mongolia,” Setev laments.

Altantuya was fully “Russianised” when the family returned to Mongolia at the start of the 1990s democratic revolution which ended 70 years of socialism of the Soviet era.

“People, raised under well-controlled socialism were in a shock when suddenly everything became possible for them,” says Setev, but not Altantuya. Setev recalls how, when most typically gentle and conservative Mongolians were fumbling with new freedoms, she spoke Russian at home and exhibited the “fast, open and direct” traits of a Russian. She was driving a car in Ulaanbataar when female drivers were rare in Mongolia.

But the protective nature of the socialism ingrained in her since childhood led to her death, Setev believes: “We were naïve. We knew nothing of kidnapping, drugs, corruption, and cheat for monetary gain.”

Altantuya was 18 when her first son was born into a brief marriage. “I want to age with my son. He will be growing up when I’m still young,” she once told her father.

Both sons have been deeply damaged by her murder, Setev says: “When the kids grow they want to call someone mum. Who stopped their rights to call her mum? What can I say to those Malaysians? Really, what can I say?”

After years of schoolyard and other bullying over his mother’s highly publicised murder, the eldest grandson now shuts himself away from the small community of Ulaanbaatar.

“A goat baby with no mother would even seek help from a wolf,” says Setev, who once had to move fast to save him from a jail sentence after a street fight.

“He can’t live in Mongolia,” says Setev, who adds that his youngest daughter’s son had experienced “severe outrage” from peers and from his mother’s co-workers.

Setev further tells he lied to his youngest grandson for three years about the murder. He would buy gifts for him and say, “This is from your mum”, but the boy kept asking for her until he finally was told “she will never come home” - so as to explain the meaning of death to a child’s mind. “You have to be responsible,” says Setev.

“Democracy is not a humanitarian society,” he continues. “It is a money-oriented society where money comes first and people second. If there was humanity people should talk about the kids and help them.

“Why should they talk about Altantuya (now that she was gone)? They only talk about how much money is involved in this case. Where is the integrity? If we are learning a lesson from this society, it is teaching us to get a lot of money by whatever it takes.”

But, he does not want her killers executed. He explains: “The death penalty is an irresponsible act. One should feel sorrow for what one has done throughout his lifetime. Thus, killing is an act of resting that animal. Killing those two murderers is also the act of getting rid of the witnesses”.

Setev firmly believes Sirul and Azilah “just followed their order without knowing what they were really doing” and he fears all key evidence and witnesses, including the two killers, are under threat to vanish.

“This is a society that is so used to killing people,” he says. “As long as evidence or witnesses disappear, the case is no more, and they think all this would go away and no one would know.”

Convinced that Malaysian authorities “have no interest in resolving the case”, he is counting on the opposition winning office someday soon and having “the integrity, the fairness and the power to makes things right”.

ENDS