The youngest daughter of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva, has thanked her fellow citizens for showing their support in her father’s struggle to overcome his serious illness, TASS reports.
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“At the moment, it is too early to make any forecasts about his condition in the future”, she wrote.
When the Union collapsed in 1991 Karimov became president of an independent Uzbekistan.
The 78-year-old Karimov has ruled Uzbekistan since Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev made him the republic’s Communist Party chief in 1989.
“We value our relationship with Uzbekistan”, said Peskov.
On Sunday, the Uzbek government announced that Karimov, long dogged by rumours of ill health, had been hospitalised, without giving details.
Finding a compromise candidate would be the first order of business for Karimov’s inner circle, a group with disparate interests and opinions, he said.
Karimov has always been the subject of rumours of ill health that are hard to verify, since information in the central Asian country is very tightly controlled.
Karimov lacks a clear successor after being re-elected to a fifth term in 2015 with more than 90 percent of the vote. He is regarded as an iron-fisted leader, who has been elected three times in elections deemed neither free nor fair by election monitors.
“We know that there were different reports that have not been confirmed”.
Following his recent health problems, prime-minister Shavkat Mirzioiev and vice-minister Rustam Azimov are the leading candidates in order to replace Mr. Karimov.
The statement posted on Instagram by his daughter, Lola Karimova, has sparked debate over how a power transition might work in a country that Karimov has ruled as his personal fiefdom for 27 years.
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He was born on January 30, 1938 in Samarkand. Uzbekistan has fiercely denied all the allegations against it.
