From the BBC:
Syria’s Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan has committed suicide, the official news agency in Damascus says.
He was reportedly questioned by a UN investigator last month over the murder of ex-Lebanese PM Rafik Hariri.
For many years Kanaan was Syria’s powerful intelligence chief in Lebanon, which was dominated by Syria until its military withdrawal earlier this year.
Hours before his death, he gave what he called his “last” interview, saying he had served Lebanon with honesty.
Mr Kanaan’s chief aide said that he had shot himself in the mouth at his office in the interior ministry.
“Gen Kanaan left his office to go home, then he came back after three quarters of an hour, took a gun from the drawer and fired a bullet into his mouth,” General Walid Abaza told the AFP news agency. […]
Many will now suspect that Kanaan was a sacrificial lamb, conveniently eliminated before the release of the UN report into Hariri’s death, says BBC Middle East analyst Roger Hardy.
Michael J. Totten, in Lebanon, agrees:
I talked to several Muslims and several Christians in Lebanon about this today. None believe he actually killed himself. This country is rife with conspiracy theories, but Iām inclined to agree with them this time. The Syrian regime is a mafia with an army, and it acts like it.
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