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Egypt's former intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, the urbane and shadowy power broker who enforced Hosni Mubarak's rule, died in the United States of a heart attack on Thursday. He was 76. General Suleiman symbolised the autocratic, military-backed rule which dominated much of the Arab world for the last half-century or more, now being challenged by restive populations.
Nicknamed "the black box" for his role as one of Mubarak's most trusted advisers, he was also a willing point man in the rendition of Egyptian fighters from Iraq and Afghanistan - in which the United States handed over prisoners to Egypt for interrogation. Rights groups said he was involved in the widespread torture of detainees.
According to state news agency MENA, he died of a sudden heart attack after suffering heart and lung problems. Preparations were under way to bring his body home for burial, his assistant, Hussein Kamal, told Reuters.
Egypt's interim government paid tribute to Suleiman, calling him a "patriotic, honest figure" in a statement carried by state news website Al-Ahram. But to his critics, he was at the heart of a system that brutally abused anyone who opposed it; a system which with the election of the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Mursi as president in June is now being replaced by the very Islamists it sought to contain. In one of the more widely quoted tales of Suleiman's alleged ruthlessness, Ron Suskind, a journalist and expert on the George W. Bush government, said when US intelligence officials asked him for a DNA sample from a relative of al Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahri - he offered to send the man's arm.
In the end, it fell to Suleiman to announce the end of Mubarak's 30 years in power on February 11, 2011. Having spent most of his career in the shadows, he moved firmly into the public eye in the last days of Mubarak's rule when the president appointed him as his deputy, part of efforts to defuse the uprising raging in Cairo's Tahrir Square.
In his 13 days as vice president, Suleiman held unprecedented talks on political reform with opposition forces, including the then-outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. But the youthful revolutionaries who spearheaded the uprising were incensed by his suggestion that Egyptians were not ready for democracy, and the man credited with having saved Mubarak's life during a 1995 assassination attempt in Ethiopia was not able to save his presidency.
As Egypt's top man on national security, he was the mastermind behind the fragmentation of Islamist groups who rose up against the state. In the year before his death one of those groups, Al-Gama'a Al-Islamiya, moved into the political mainstream and won seats in parliament. Suleiman was born on July 2, 1936 in Qena, in southern Egypt. He enrolled in Egypt's premier military academy in 1954 and received further military training in the then Soviet Union. He also studied political science at Cairo University and Ain Shams University.
His full role in the opaque Mubarak administration is likely to remain a mystery. His role extended well beyond the remit of an intelligence chief, including tasks more akin to those of a foreign minister, managing relations with the United States and Israel.

Copyright Reuters, 2012

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