Citing a source close to the Karimovs, Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency reports Gulnara Karimova, the elder daughter of the late President of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov, is alive.
“Gulnara Karimova is alive, information about her death is false," the source said but refraining from giving further details and the information on her current whereabouts.
Another source told Interfax that such kinds of messages do not reflect the reality.
The National News Service called this report fake referring to one of the sources familiar with the situation. The source said the news portal reporting this information “does not have very high reputation and can be a subject of someone's game.”
Uzbekistan-focused website centre1.com ran a piece on November 22 claiming to have received reliable evidence from a solitary would-be security services source stating that Gulnara Karimova had perished, the victim of a poisoning plot. The mysterious source, which foreign-based centre1.com takes at his word, adds further that the 44-year-old Karimova died on November 5 and was secretly buried at the Minor cemetery in an unmarked grave.
Gulnara Karimova (born July 8, 1972) is the elder daughter of Islam Karimov. She is the founder of the Forum of Culture and Arts of Uzbekistan Foundation and chairperson of its Board of Trustees; she is also the head of a number of NGOs focused on cultural and social aspects of life in Uzbekistan. In 2015, an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project reported that Karimova had taken over $US1 billion in bribes from Scandinavian and Russian telecoms companies wanting involvement in the Uzbek market. Karimova is also under investigation in Uzbekistan on charges of corruption, although she denies any wrongdoing.
Islam Karimov (January 30, 1938 – September 2, 2016) was the first president of Uzbekistan from its independence on September 1, 1991 to his death in 2016. Before that, he was the President of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic from March 24, 1990 until he declared the independence of Uzbekistan on 1 September 1991. He was the last First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan from 1989 to 1991, when the party was reconstituted as the People's Democratic Party of Uzbekistan (PDP); he led the PDP until 1996.
