Buried With Secrets

Ghazi Kanaan shot himself in the mouth—or not.

By Christopher Dickey

Newsweek

Oct. 24, 2005 issue - Did he kill himself or was he killed? Had he blown the whistle on massive corruption, or did he just get too greedy? Could he have been the man behind the sensational murder of a former Lebanese prime minister, or was he going to rat out the real killer? Damascus is an Orwellian wonderland of rewritten histories and untrue facts, so when the regime there announced last week that Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan had taken his own life, there were very few points on which intelligence analysts, diplomats and politicians could agree. Except one: Kanaan knew too much. He was in a position, in fact, to know everything that the Mafia-style regime of President Bashar al-Assad would never want known by anyone outside the inner circle of siblings, in-laws and cousins.