(AKI) - Ali Kanaan, the brother of Syria's former powerful interior minister Ghazi Kanaan, has been found dead near his farm in the coastal city of Jalba. Ghazi Kanaan died last year in an apparent suicide in his office. | The news was announced by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which underlined that Ali's dismembered corpse had been found on the railway lines in the Bustan Bacha area and his car left abandoned nearby. |
Based on comments from Kanaan's relative, the Observatory revealed that Ali had been suffering from depression and recently did nothing else but sleep in his house in the country.
| Ghazi Kanaan, who was also Syria's intelligence chief, shot himself in the neck in October 2005. |
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had hinted during a press interview that his minister of the interior was involved in a plot against the regime, in cahoots with forces outside Syria. The former vice president Abd al-Halim Khaddam, who founded the Syrian Salvation Front, had cast doubts on Kanaan's suicide, accusing the secret services of having killed him because "he knew the truth about the murder of former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri," and other unresolved questions.
