Was intelligence chief’s death really a suicide?

The week's news at a glance.

Syria

Did Ghazi Kanaan know too much? asked Nicholas Nassif in Beirut’s An Nahar. The late Syrian interior minister was until this year the most powerful man in Lebanon. As head of the Syrian intelligence services in Beirut during much of the three-decade Syrian occupation, he controlled all Lebanese access to Damascus. But then the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri sparked Lebanese protests that drove the Syrian presence out of the country. Last week, Kanaan was found dead in his Damascus office, a gun in his hand. The official verdict was suicide. But we have to wonder. Kanaan had reportedly been cooperating with the U.N. investigation into Hariri’s murder. Was he, in turn, murdered? After all, he was the man “who knew the most about Syria’s secrets in Lebanon.” Conveniently, “those secrets are gone with him.”

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