NUR-SULTAN, August 16. /TASS/. Dariga Nazarbayev, former speaker of Kazakhstan’s Senate, or upper parliament house, and a daughter of the country’s first President Nursultan Nazarbayev, has confirmed the death of her son Aisultan.

"My family is grieving about the death of our dear Aisultan. And in this very difficult moment, we hope that people will demonstrate understanding and respect to our irreparable loss," she wrote on Sunday on the Facebook account of the Nursultan Nazarbayev Fund she head.

Zakon.kz, a news portal, reported earlier on Sunday that Aisultan had died, presumably of a heart failure, last night in London at the age of 29.

Aisultan is the son of Nazarbayev’s elder daughter Dariga, who was speaker of Kazakhstan’s upper house until early May. His father Rakhat Aliyev, who had held several posts in the government, moved to Austria and was granted political asylum. Later he was arrested upon Kazakhstan’s request and was imprisoned and was found dead in his prison cell in 2015.

According to zakon.kz, Aisultan graduated from the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in the United Kingdom in 2010 and worked for Kazakhstan’s main intelligence department for one year since 2012.

On February 13, 2020 Aisultan allegedly wrote two posts on his Facebook page requesting political asylum in the UK, complaining of pressure against him. On the same day, Kazakhstan’s Minister of Information and Social Development Dauren Abayev dismissed this speculation, saying that Aisultan was "a drug addict.".