OUTSIDE the heavily guarded grey exterior of a neo-socialist building in Damascus, young men wearing cheap, wide-lapel suits brandish Russian-made machineguns, sharing guard duty with police who sit for hours in a glass aluminium-framed sentry box protecting the Syrian interior ministry.

The men in civvies report to bosses in Syria’s powerful intelligence services. The less powerful uniformed police answer to the interior minister himself.

Last Wednesday all hell was let loose with the sound of a single gunshot heard coming from the ministerial suite on the first floor. Inside was a scene of horror.

Witnesses say the minister, Ghazi Kanaan, had a gaping head wound. He was dying under two large portraits of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and his late father Hafez. Fine damascene silk chairs were splashed with blood.

Kanaan was an unlikely candidate for suicide. Before his promotion to minister he had been the de facto ruler of Lebanon for two turbulent decades of civil war and Israeli occupation as head of Syrian military intelligence. He was politically savvy and could be ruthless.

In Damascus a hastily arranged Syrian investigation into his death lasted a mere 24 hours. Officials say the minister picked up his .38 calibre Smith & Wesson revolver, stuck the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. “I can’t believe it,” said a cabinet colleague, close to tears. “Why is this happening?”

Strangely, Kanaan had telephoned a Lebanese radio station shortly before the gun went off. He spoke about a recent deposition he had given to a United Nations-led commission of inquiry into the assassination last Valentine’s Day of Rafik Hariri, who served five terms as the prime minister of Lebanon.

Kanaan used the broadcast to deny that he was mixed up in a multi-million-dollar political scandal, ending with the apparently ominous words: “I think this is the last statement I can give.”

The apparent suicide of a pillar of the regime comes as Syria faces huge and unrelenting pressure, notably over its role in Lebanon and over Washington’s accusation that it allows terrorists to cross into Iraq. “I hear for the first time that this regime has become very weak,” said Sarkis Naoum, a Lebanese analyst. “This regime could collapse.”

Next Friday the head of the UN commission investigating Hariri’s murder, which is led by Detlef Mehlis, a German prosecutor, will present the findings of three months of detective work.

Hariri died in a huge bomb blast that killed 20 other people on Beirut’s Mediterranean seashore. A billionaire businessman who had turned politician, Hariri was the founding father of a reconstructed post-war Lebanon.

Throughout his 10 years in office Hariri had little choice but to work with Syria, whose troops entered Lebanon in 1976, early in the 15-year civil war, at the request of the Lebanese government.

Privately, though, Hariri bridled at Syrian interference in Lebanese affairs, which permeated both the security apparatus and the political elite and ate into most aspects of moneymaking.

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