UNITED NATIONS – Evidence of tensions within the Syrian regime couldn’t be more dramatic than the announcement by Syria that its minister of the interior committed suicide in his office in Damascus as pressure was mounting from the United Nations for a full accounting of the murder in February of Prime Minister Hariri, the former leader of Lebanon.

The Middle East was stunned by the Baathist regime’s announcement that the minister, Ghazi Kanaan, committed suicide. Lebanese and foreign intelligence officials see the announcement as intended to set up a scapegoat for the assassination of Hariri. Separately yesterday, the Syrian strongman, President Assad, said that any Syrian implicated in the Hariri assassination would be considered a traitor and be punished.

The two events were seen as Syrian jockeying for position ahead of a crucial report by a U.N.-appointed investigator, Detlev Mehlis, assigned to probe the Hariri assassination. Mr. Mehlis returned to Beirut yesterday after spending a few days in Vienna, where he is working on his report, a U.N. spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said. The report will be presented to members of the Security Council on October 25.

In 2003, Kanaan ended his stint as the powerful controller of Lebanon, where he was the de facto ruler since Syria began its occupation in the 1980s. The only source describing the circumstances surrounding his death was a government news agency. “Interior Minister Brig. Gen. Ghazi Kenaan committed suicide in his office before noon,” the Syrian Arab News Agency reported yesterday.

American officials declined to confirm that the cause of the death was suicide. Kanaan “was a central figure in the Syrian government’s occupation of Lebanon for many years,” a State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, said. “His role and that of other key officials in the Syrian leadership has come under increased scrutiny lately in light of recent events in Lebanon, in light of the Mehlis report’s activities.”

According to Lebanese press reports, Kanaan was one of seven Syrian officials who had been interviewed by Mr. Mehlis in Damascus, along with Syria’s last intelligence chief in Lebanon, Brigadier General Rustum Ghazale, who was often mentioned as another possible suspect in staging the Hariri assassination. Earlier, Syria had refused to cooperate with the U.N. investigation team. Four pro-Syrian former Lebanese officials had been arrested after Mr. Mehlis accused them of complicity in the assassination, which triggered the Cedar Revolution that forced Syrian troops to eventually withdraw from Lebanon.

“I don’t think Kanaan committed suicide,” the Lebanon desk editor of the English-language Daily Star, Mayssam Zaaroura, told The New York Sun yesterday. Speaking from Beirut, she said Damascus might attempt to set Kanaan up as “a scapegoat” who would be blamed for Hariri’s death.

A close adviser to the former president Hafez Assad, Kanaan had remained in the inner circles after Assad’s son, Bashar, took power. He is a blood relative of Bashar Assad’s mother, Anissa, and was considered a mentor to the inexperienced young president. Syria watchers, nevertheless, were not convinced that he took his own life.

“He did not look a man who would commit suicide,” a former Pentagon adviser, Richard Perle, said.

One of the powerful Lebanese who immediately expressed similar doubts was the Maronite-Christian former army general Michel Aoun, who once escaped Lebanon to Paris but recently returned to form his own political party. Mr. Aoun also told Lebanese reporters he doubted the authenticity of the last radio interview Kanaan gave, to Voice of Lebanon, before his demise. Kanaan ended his VOL phone interview by saying, “I believe this is the last statement that I can make.” Mr. Aoun called for a voice analysis of the interview.

In the interview, Kanaan confirmed that he had met Mr. Mehlis, but denied that he had informed on corrupt Syrian officials, and that Hariri ever gave him money. A day earlier, the Lebanese press reported that Kanaan handed over cancelled checks from Hariri to the Mehlis team. According to the reports, Kanaan presented the presumed bribe to show that he had no incentive to kill Hariri.

“You cannot believe a word Syrian officials say because they lie through their teeth,” Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York who had sponsored the powerful Syrian Accountability Act, told the Sun. It is “curious,” Mr. Engel added, that Kanaan, an intelligence veteran who “knows where all the skeletons are, where the dead bodies are literally and figuratively, that just a few days after he testifies to the United Nations and talks to a reporter on radio, then he suddenly and supposedly kills himself.”

The impression that Syria sacrificed one of its own as preparation for a U.N. report that might deal a blow to the Baathist regime was strengthened as President Assad announced in a rare television interview that he intends to punish any Syrian who might have been involved in Hariri’s death.

“This is the first time that Assad even considers the possibility that a Syrian might be found guilty in the assassination,” said a Western diplomat who visits Damascus often, asking not to be identified.

“If indeed there is a Syrian national implicated in it, he would be considered as a traitor and most severely punished,” Mr. Assad told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour hours before the reports on Kanaan’s death. In the segment, he switched to Arabic after mostly speaking English, presumably to parse his words better.

“However, we are confident that Syria is not involved, and so far, there is no material evidence of Syrian involvement. We are confident of that.”

American, Israeli, and other Western intelligence officials contacted by the Sun were cautious yesterday, saying it was too early to tell what happened.

“There is some reason to suspect that this might be something more than a suicide, because perhaps nobody knows more about Syria’s involvement in Lebanon in the past 20 years than Ghazi Kanaan,” a recently-retired State Department deputy director for Middle East intelligence, Wayne White, said. “The immediate cause of possible foul play here might be something that has nothing to do with the Mehlis investigation, like the long history of political economic competition among key members of that regime,” Mr. White added.

“At this point there is no indication that this is anything other than a suicide, but a lot is not clear,” said one U.S. government official who asked not to be named. Others in Washington were willing to accept parts of the Syrian version. Kanaan “may have perceived that he is expendable” and that he would even be handed over to international justice, said the director of the Middle East Studies program at George Washington University, Murhaf Jouejati, who is a native Syrian. Assassinating him would only increase Syria’s isolation and “they would not be doing themselves any favor by doing this,” he said.