Uzbekistan’s cabinet of ministers says that the country’s 78-year-old leader Islam Karimov has been “hospitalized”, in a statement published by the country’s state news agency.
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Karimov, who tolerates no dissent, has ruled Uzbekistan since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made him the republic’s Communist Party chief in 1989. His elder daughter, Gulnara, has not appeared in public since several media including the BBC reported in 2014 that she had been placed under house arrest.
Uzbekistan – which borders each of the other Central Asian states, as well as Afghanistan – is the most populous country in Central Asia with some 30 million people. He then evicted them in anger over USA criticism of a violent crackdown on a 2005 uprising in Andijan, where Uzbek troops fired on demonstrators, killing more than 700 people, according to witnesses and human rights groups.
The militant Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) conducted attacks in Uzbekistan in 1999, included an attempt to take Karimov’s life.
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In the 1990s, armed gunmen of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan challenged the Tashkent government but majority have since left the country, moving to Afghanistan where they fought alongside the Taliban.
