The Guardian

Gulnara Karimova: new details emerge in story of Uzbekistan's first daughter

Iman Karimova describes the arrest of her mother and being held captive near Tashkent

Police raids, an ad hoc trial, and an aide who committed suicide by drinking vinegar: the 20-year-old daughter of Gulnara Karimova has provided new details about the remarkable fall from grace of her mother, the daughter of Uzbekistan’s late dictator Islam Karimov.

Karimova was one of the richest and most privileged people in post-Soviet Central Asia until her arrest in 2014, apparently on the orders of her own father. Her story has always resembled a tale from a morality play: vanity, corruption, hubris and eventual downfall, played out against a backdrop of an ageing autocrat and his feuding family.

The details have remained murky and shrouded in rumour and speculation, however. Now her daughter Iman, who has spent much of the past five years in

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