Daughter of Uzbek president ‘looted museum’

London: The daughter of the president of Uzbekistan has been accused of looting treasures from the country’s national museum to furnish her palatial home in Switzerland. Gulnara Karimova, 41, had been based on the banks of Lake Geneva as her country’s ambassador to the United Nations.

But Sefer Bekjan, a 53-year-old Uzbek dissident, accessed the house with a key he claims was given to him by housekeepers and spent a week living there and documenting its contents — some of which he claims were stolen.

Among the items photographed and published on Bekjan’s blog are gold and silver jewellery, ornate oriental rugs, a Mercedes, a Bentley, and an 18th century, jewel-encrusted Quran.

He also claimed to have uncovered more than 60 museum artworks, including rare paintings by celebrated Uzbek artists.

Bekjan took photographs of himself in the villa, holding Pomegranate, a still life by Lev Reznikov, who died in 2003. Reznikov’s son Igor said the painting had been sold to the Uzbekistan Art Museum in 1990. “It’s a museum item,” he said. “It should be in a museum.”

As a fashion designer, diplomat, pop singer and businesswoman, Karimova was one of Uzbekistan’s most prominent individuals, but she now believes her mother and sister are part of a plot to discredit her.

She took to Twitter to vent her fury in November after Uzbek TV and radio stations imposed a media blackout, and accused unspecified enemies of trying to poison her with mercury.

She also castigated her 75-year-old dictator father’s feared security service in an interview with The Guardian last month, and made allegations of corruption against a number of senior Uzbek figures. She has reportedly accused the security services of giving Bekjan the key, in an effort to further smear her name.