The initial message followed days of unofficial reports Mr Karimov was near to death after he suffered a stroke last week.
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The RIA-Novosti news agency on Friday cited the Uzbek government as saying his funeral would be held on Saturday.
Police had cordoned off most of the centre of the city and were not letting ordinary citizens or cars through.
Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov with Russian President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping as they prepare to pose for a photo during the SCO summit in Ufa, Russia.
Crowds lined the roads on Saturday as Central Asian Uzbekistan buried Islam Karimov – the only leader the nation has known since independence – amid pomp and high security in the splendour of his home city Samarkand. His death “is a great loss of the Uzbek people”, ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said, according to state media.
Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyaev, the head of the commission organizing the funeral, gave a speech in the ceremony and paid tribute to Karimov, whom he called the “founder of the state” and a “great and dear son of the nation”.
People would check who headed the funeral commission for a clue concerning who’d take over, when Soviet leaders died.
Karimov was Uzbekistans first and only president after it became independent from the then USSR in 1991.
In a court drama with echoes of Shakespeare, the former Soviet apparatchik – at the helm since 1989 – had his eldest daughter put under house arrest in 2014 during a family feud in which she compared him to brutal Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.
His death pushes the strategically located landlocked country into a “phase of uncertainty”, the head of the Russian lower house of parliament’s worldwide affairs committee, Alexei Pushkov, said Friday.
Under the constitution, if the president dies his duties pass temporarily to the head of the senate until an election can be held within three months.
Islam Karimov was born in Samarkand province of Uzbekistan.
Mr Karimov was criticised throughout his rule by the West and human rights groups for his authoritarian style of leadership.
“Islam Karimov has been the state for over quarter of a century, ruling with an iron fist”, Steve Swerdlow, Central Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, told AFP.
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That enthusiasm isn’t shared by rights activists.
