Gulnara Karimova. Image screenshotted and cropped from her music video Round Run. The Internet is swiming with the appalling rumour that Gulnara Karimova, disgraced elder daughter of Uzbekistan's late dictator Islam Karimov, has been poisoned to death by the same brutal government he forged over three decades in power. The single-source report on Gulnara's poisoning that has been quoted by everyone from Russian opposition MPs on Facebook to the British tabloid press, is just that: a single source report. It appeared on Centre1.com, a Central Asian news website run by exiled Uzbek journalist Galima Bukharbayeva, who was famous as the editor of the disbanded Uznews website before it. To be sure Berlin-based Bukharbayeva is no journalistic lightweight. She received the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Prize for her coverage of the regime-defining Andijan events of 2005 during which anywhere between 187 (official count) and several thousand unarmed citizens were gunned to death by security forces in the Central Asian country. Uznews enjoyed a fairly decent reputation before it suddenly ceased to exist following a hack, suspected as having been carried out by the Uzbek government, compromised the identities of its contributors in 2014. The source for the Centre1 report, however, is a purported anonymous official in Uzbekistan's incredibly opaque SNB security sevice, which is the heir to the Soviet-era KGB and a hive of vested interests at the apex of a political world predicated on violence and intrigue. Currently, therefore, the information is non-official, and impossible to verify. This did not prevent the British Daily Mail newspaper running with the sensational headline Billionaire ‘princess’ daughter of former Uzbek president ‘who was locked up in a psychiatric hospital for two years by his successor has now been fatally POISONED’ , and speculating with no evidence that Karimova was once “the richest woman in the former Soviet Union”. That headline itself harks back to an earlier Daily Mail headline predicated on a Facebook post by an anonymously-run group Health to [Islam] Karimov, that suggested Karimov's successor, interim leader Shavkat Mirziyoyev, had transferred Karimova from house arrest to a psychiatric institute. The late Islam Karimov. Russian government image. Creative Commons. Mirziyoyev of course, could not have kept her there for two years as suggested by the second headline, because he has only been in power for two months, following Karimov's September 3 funeral after a reported stroke. What is known is that Gulnara Karimova — unlike her mother Tatiana and younger sister, Lola, whom she blasted with bitter barbs on Twitter in 2013 — was not shown on television footage from the funeral. It has also been widely reported that she was under house arrest during her father's lifetime from at least 2014 onwards, and that many of her closest friends and associates have been arrested and jailed in recent years. Since she left Twitter after venting at her family, numerous accounts have emerged pretending to her identity, at least one of which was proven to be false by journalists of RFE/RL's Uzbek service. Map of Uzbekistan. Creative Commons. A country of 32 million people in Central Asia. It borders Kazakhstan to the north, Tajikistan to the southeast, Kyrgyzstan to the northeast, Afghanistan to the south and Turkmenistan to the southwest. The Uzbek government is regarded as an elite human rights offender, claiming a place alongside the likes of North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Press freedom is close to non-existent, triggering a reliance on foreign based news services with sources inside the country for information about it. The economy runs on cotton, which children and state employees have been documented as being forced to harvest, gold and other commodities. Around three million Uzbeks work abroad in Russia. Karimova performing a duet with Gerard Depardieu. YouTube capture screenshotted and cropped from Newsy World report on Karimova, uploaded onto the outlet's official YouTube channel September 16, 2014. Karimova is 44-years old. Over the course of a colourful and controversy-laden life she has been a pop singer, fashion designer, ambassador to the United Nations and was regularly mentioned as a pretender to her father's throne prior to her well-publicized but little-understood downfall. She is regularly referred to as one of the most corrupt people in Uzbekistan, and is at the centre of ongoing investigations targeting Western-based telecoms companies that allegedly paid her billions of dollars-worth of bribes to secure access to the country's market.