BEIRUT -- Rostom Ghazali, the Syrian general once considered the most powerful man in Lebanon and a key suspect in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, has died in a hospital in the capital, Damascus, a Syrian activist and local media reported Friday.
Ghazali, in his early 60s, was once head of the Syrian military's powerful political security branch and one of Syrian President Bashar Assad's most trusted generals.
There was no official government comment, and the circumstances of his death remained unclear Friday.
Director of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights Rami Abdurrahman said Ghazali died nearly two months after he was admitted with a head injury. Abdurrahman said Ghazali had been clinically dead for weeks, quoting informed medical officials in the hospital.
The Beirut-based Al-Mayadeen TV, which has access to Syrian officials, and other Lebanese TV stations also reported Ghazali's death, quoting officials.
Reports at the time of Ghazali's injury said he was beaten by the bodyguards of another Syrian general in an escalation of a political dispute.
The reports said the disagreement between the two generals started after Ghazali's men were not allowed to play a bigger role in a government offensive against opposition fighters battling the government.
Lebanese media reported that both Ghazali and his rival general were sacked. Reshuffles in Syria's security and military apparatuses are generally not made public.
Ghazali, a Sunni Muslim from the southern village of Qarfa, rose in the military to become the intelligence chief in Lebanon in 2002, replacing long-serving Gen. Ghazi Kenaan, who became interior minister.
Ghazali kept the post until 2005, when Syrian forces had to withdraw from the tiny Arab country, ending nearly three decades of military presence after anti-Syrian protests after Hariri's February 2005 assassination.
A United Nations probe later that year concluded that high-ranking Syrian and Lebanese security officials, including Ghazali, plotted Hariri's assassination. A U.N.-backed tribunal is currently trying five Hezbollah members in absentia over the killing. Both Damascus and Hezbollah have strongly denied involvement.
In 2012, after a bomb killed four of the country's top generals in Damascus, Ghazali was named by Assad as head of Syria's Political Security Department and stayed in the job until mid-March.
Meanwhile, frustrated by four years of deadlock among world powers on how to end the war in Syria, the U.N. recruited actor Angelina Jolie to criticize the inaction that's allowing the suffering of millions of refugees.
"We cannot look at Syria and the evil that has arisen from the ashes of indecision and think that this is not the lowest point in the world's inability to protect and defend the innocent," Jolie told the Security Council on Friday in her capacity as special envoy of the U.N. Refugee Agency.
"The crisis is made worse by division and indecision within the international community preventing the Security Council from fulfilling its responsibilities," Jolie said.
More than 220,000 Syrians have died since the war began in March 2011, as Russia, with China's backing, has blocked Security Council resolutions that threatened the longevity of its ally Assad. The two resolutions would have ordered sanctions against the Assad regime for refusing a peace plan and prosecution of the regime by a world tribunal.
Jolie, who said she has made 11 trips to visit Syrian refugees since the conflict began, said hope is fading among the almost 4 million Syrians who were forced to flee across borders. She urged the council to visit Syrian refugees to "see at firsthand their suffering and the impact on the region."
UN humanitarian affairs chief Valerie Amos prefaced Jolie's speech with an even grimmer picture of the Syrian people's suffering. There are fresh allegations of chemical weapons use against civilians who continue to be subjected to indiscriminate fire from air and from underground, Amos said.
In addition to those who have fled the country, more than 7.6 million people are displaced within Syria, she added.
"People have become numb to figures that should, every day, shock our collective conscience and spur actions," she said. "We need the numbness to the senseless violence and the apparent apathy to end."
Information for this article was contributed by Sarah El Deeb and Bassem Mroue of The Associated Press and by Sangwon Yoon of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 04/25/2015