MOSCOW  A prominent human rights worker who for a decade documented kidnappings and killings in Chechnya was snatched outside her home on Wednesday and found a few hours later near a highway in a neighboring republic, dead of gunshot wounds to the head and chest.

The victim, Natalya Estemirova, 50, had become a central source of information on abuses in Chechnya, where separatist war has given way to a brutal counterinsurgency campaign. In recent years, Ms. Estemirova focused on kidnappings that she believed had been carried out under the authority of the Chechen president, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, who has enjoyed unwavering public support from the Kremlin.

Her work met with threats and denunciations from Chechen authorities. In March 2008, after Ms. Estemirova criticized a new law requiring women in Chechnya to wear head scarves, Mr. Kadyrov summoned her to a personal meeting and threatened her, an experience so frightening that she went abroad for several months, said Tatyana Kasatkina, deputy director of the Russian human rights group Memorial, where Ms. Estemirova had worked since 1999. Friends tried to convince Ms. Estemirova to stay away, but she felt compelled to return.

An employee with Memorial’s Moscow office, Andrei Mironov, said several men pushed Ms. Estemirova into a white car as she left for work in the Chechen capital of Grozny about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday. Witnesses said that she yelled out that she was being kidnapped. Her body was found in the afternoon about 50 miles away, a few hundred yards off a highway in Ingushetia, according to a statement by the prosecutor general’s investigative wing. The authorities said her purse, with her passport and other documents, was found nearby.