Aisultan Nazarbaev, a grandson of former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev who suffered from drug addiction and had run-ins with the law in the United Kingdom, has died in London at the age of 29.
His mother, former Kazakh parliament speaker Darigha Nazarbaeva, confirmed her son's death in an August 16 statement.
"My family is devastated at the loss of our beloved Aisultan and we ask for privacy at this very difficult time," she wrote on the Facebook page of the Nursultan Nazarbaev Fund, which she heads.
Aisultan Nazarbaev once served as as vice president of Kazakhstan's national soccer federation, but in recent years made news for criticizing the Kazakh authorities and members of his powerful family.
In October 2019 a British court handed him a suspended sentence for assaulting a London police officer earlier that year.
In February he announced that he was seeking asylum in the United Kingdom.
He was the second son of Nazarbaeva and her late ex-husband, Rakhat Aliyev, a critic of Nursultan Nazarbaev who died in 2015 in an Austrian prison while under investigation for murder.
Aisultan Nazarbaev, who in 2017 admitted to suffering from drug addiction, reportedly died of cardiac arrest.