A German newspaper reported on Tuesday that Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev had been admitted to a hospital in the city of Hamburg, but the hospital named in the report declined to comment.
Mass-circulation Bild said, without naming its source, that the 71-year-old Kazakh leader had admitted himself to the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany. The report said the for his admission to hospital was unknown.
"There is a celebrity patient being closely guarded in the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf -- and according to information obtained by Bild it is Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev who is being secretly treated here.
"It is not known what he is suffering from," Bild said.
A spokesman for the hospital would not comment and denied there was any extra security at the hospital, Reuters reported.
"We have no special security measures in place," he said. "But our policy is never to talk about patients so I can neither confirm nor deny this."
Officials at the Kazakh embassy in Berlin were not available for comment and a spokesman for the German foreign ministry said he was unable to confirm the Bild report.
Nazarbayev, who has ruled the oil-rich central Asian republic for more than 20 years, is on vacation, according to a government spokeswoman in Astana who said she had no information on his current whereabouts or the planned date of his return.
"I cannot confirm the report," said a spokeswoman at the Kazakh embassy in Berlin. "He's on vacation and he could be anywhere in the world."
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