MOSCOW >> Islam Karimov, a ruthless autocrat who ruled Uzbekistan for almost three decades, died Friday in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. He was 78.

A joint statement by the Cabinet of Ministers and the Parliament announced the death, saying he had a stroke that led to multiple organ failure.

The announcement came after a long, strange interlude during which Uzbek officials refrained from confirming the death even while the leaders of Turkey and Georgia expressed condolences, mosque leaders were barred from offering prayers for the president’s health, and funeral arrangements were being made very publicly. A respected opposition website posted pictures of cemetery workers in Samarkand, the president’s hometown, digging a fresh grave in a prominent location.

The most likely reason for the official silence was that top government officials had been unable to decide on the succession and did not want to announce that Karimov was dead until they could also say who would replace him, at least temporarily.

The official statement said the prime minister, Shavkat Mirziyoev, who is widely deemed to be the president’s most likely successor, would lead the funeral Saturday and Karimov would be buried in Samarkand in accordance with Muslim rites.

Long in poor health, Karimov had a stroke on Aug. 27, ending what was often described as one of the most brutal reigns to emerge from the collapse of the Soviet Union, exemplified by its continued use of forced labor for Uzbekistan’s annual cotton harvest.

The circumstances of his death remain murky. The first hint that he was critically ailing came in a government statement Sunday saying he had been hospitalized. It gave no other details. But in a Facebook post, his younger daughter, Lola Karimova-Tillyaeva, Uzbekistan’s ambassador to UNESCO in Paris, said he had had a brain hemorrhage.

On Friday she posted a black, blank picture on Instagram, saying, “He left us … I am trying to choose words and don’t believe in it myself.”

Rumors that Karimov had died had circulated throughout the week. The suspicion was that the state was withholding the news while officials addressed the issue of who would succeed him in running the largest nation in Central Asia, a country rich in energy reserves and viewed as a strategic crossroads by China, Russia and the United States.

It is by no means certain that Mirziyoyev, who is considered a Kremlin ally, will succeed Karimov. Rustam Azimov, a deputy prime minister and finance minister, is a possible technocratic alternative.

Karimov’s glamorous older daughter, Gulnara Karimov, had once been seen as having a promising political future, but those prospects disintegrated in a public soap opera involving charges of bribery, money laundering, physical violence and even sorcery.

Karimov rose through the ranks of the local Communist Party until the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev named him first secretary and effectively Uzbekistan’s chief in 1989. He won a presidential election after independence in 1991 and used Soviet methods to govern the country.

“He is the state and the state is him, and it has been that way for at least 25 years,” said Steve Swerdlow, director of Central Asia research at Human Rights Watch.

Power in Uzbekistan was concentrated in the hands of the National Security Service, modeled on the old KGB of the Soviet Union. Its long-standing but reportedly ailing director, Rustam Inoyatov, is expected to wield the greatest influence in the selection of the next president. The president’s widow, Tatyana Karimova, an economist, also holds considerable sway. Neither is known to be seeking a public role.

“It is a police state where the power belongs completely to the security services,” said Daniil Kislov, the Moscow-based editor-in-chief of the website Ferghana.ru. “The special services will not allow for any alternative on the succession.”

The immediate succession is expected to follow the constitution, which mandates that the head of the Senate run the country for three months until new presidential elections can be organized. Karimov repeatedly manipulated elections or referendums to extend his rule well beyond the two terms mandated by the constitution.

Such voting, which critics called fraudulent, always had a preordained conclusion. He won his latest presidential term in March 2015 with more than 90 percent of the vote.

Karimov jailed or exiled his political opponents and muzzled the news media. Political prisoners were estimated to number in the thousands. Torture was rife. He brushed aside any criticism that managed to bubble up despite the oppression.

“I am one of those who is criticized for staying too long,” he said in 2014. “But I want to keep working. What’s wrong with that?”

An estimated 1 million Russians still live in Uzbekistan, though the population of more than 31 million is overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. Karimov, who crushed an Islamic insurgency after surviving an assassination attempt by Islamic militants in 1999, was considered a bulwark against the spread of any jihadi threat in the region.

With him gone, there was some question whether the Islamic State or other groups might try to exploit the transition to re-emerge. “Whether or not the Islamic State sees a succession as an opportunity to create risks for the much-hated Russians remains an open question,” said Cliff Kupchan, an expert on Russia and chairman of the Eurasia Group, a risk advisory firm based in Washington.

In 1999, Karimov made his position toward radical Islam abundantly clear.

“I am prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people, to sacrifice their lives, in order to save peace and calm in the republic,” he told reporters. “If my child chose such a path, I myself would rip off his head.”

He went on to prove it, massacring hundreds of anti-government demonstrators in 2005 in the town of Andijon, a center of ethnic, social and economic tension in the fertile Fergana Valley. Both Europe and the United States imposed military sanctions.

Karimov responded by expelling U.S. forces from Karshi-Khanabad Military Base, an important link in the supply chain for the forces propping up the government in Afghanistan against the Taliban.

Supply needs eventually trumped human rights issues, and the United States restored relations, even giving the Uzbekistan forces hundreds of surplus armored vehicles as U.S. forces in Afghanistan were being drawn down.

If Karimov was a gray, reclusive figure, his older daughter and once-presumed heir was anything but. Karimova, pursuing simultaneous careers in business, diplomacy, music and fashion design, partied with rock stars and fashion designers around the globe. Yet, from the outset her revealing clothes made her an unlikely leader in a conservative Muslim society.

Karimova fell from grace in spectacular manner when, around 2013, she was put under house arrest and her business ventures were shuttered or confiscated. She was under investigation in Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and elsewhere on suspicion of pocketing bribes and participating in money-laundering schemes related to selling telecommunications licenses in Uzbekistan. She and the companies involved have denied wrongdoing.

Opposition websites alleged that Karimov beat his daughter in a fit of rage before jailing some of her associates and confining her to her home, where she remains incommunicado.

“Karimov first slapped her on the face and then really started to beat Gulnara,” according to an account, attributed to an unidentified security service insider and published in 2013 on the website of the opposition People’s Movement of Uzbekistan.

Karimova took to social media at the time to accuse her mother and her younger sister of dabbling in witchcraft. “The other part of the family destroys and is friends with sorcerers,” Karimova wrote in a post on Instagram.

Karimov’s wife and daughters survive him, as do four grandchildren.

Some analysts attributed Karimov’s reclusiveness and violent tendencies toward opponents as well as relatives and associates — he was known to pitch heavy marble ashtrays at senior aides — to his early years in a Soviet orphanage.

Islam Karimov was born on Jan. 30, 1938, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. His official biography said his father had been an office worker. Other accounts suggested that his parents, overwhelmed by a large family and meager resources, put him in an orphanage, at first temporarily, but eventually left him there.

He studied to become an engineer, worked at an airplane factory and joined the Communist Party in the early 1960s. He married in 1964, and he and his wife had a son, Petr, but soon divorced. The son is believed to have moved to Moscow decades ago and never returned.

Karimov joined Gosplan, the central Soviet economic planning agency, in 1966 and married for the second time in 1967. He rose to become the finance minister for the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan in 1983.

By all accounts Karimov hated the political jockeying by different groups in the initial burst of freedom after independence in 1991 and worked to destroy all autonomous political, media and human rights organizations.

His antipathy toward Islamic groups is sometimes linked to an episode that same year. With Soviet authority crumbling, Islamic vigilante groups had established security and social services that were lacking in the Fergana Valley, and after one extremist group seized a building, Karimov went to negotiate with its representatives. He soon found himself humiliated when a young religious leader forced him to pray publicly. Later, he banned mosques from broadcasting the call to prayer.

Over the years, Karimov also closed off the country to outside observers and put the news media under government control — one reason the circumstances of his death remain unclear.

Uzbekistan remained open to tourists, drawn to spectacular 15th-century mosques and other monuments in Silk Road cities like Samarkand. The country was also known as the site of a major environmental disaster: The diverting of water from the Aral Sea for irrigation, especially for the crucial cotton crop, drastically shrank what had once been one of the world’s largest inland bodies of water.

Karimov never lost his love of Soviet methods, be it for strengthening the domestic intelligence services or fostering a centrally planned economy, even if it kept much of the population mired in poverty. He once infamously criticized the millions of Uzbeks who had gone to take menial jobs in Russia just to survive, calling them “too lazy” to work at home.

Every year, the government forced about 1 million students and others to join Uzbekistan’s annual cotton harvest to meet government-established quotas.

“He was a Soviet man to the end,” Kislov, the web journalist, said.

© 2016 The New York Times Company