An influential relative of Syrian President Bashar Assad has been assassinated in a dispute over control of a key government stronghold, activists said Saturday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition Britain-based monitor, said Mohammad Assad was shot dead on Friday in Latakia province, the heartland of the president's Alawite community.
"Mohammad Assad, the son of one of the Syrian president's cousins, was killed by five bullets to the head in the village of Qardaha," Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.
He said the assassin was as yet unknown, but that the killing was thought to be the result of "a dispute over influence" in Qardaha, which is the ancestral village of the ruling Assad family.
There was no immediate mention of the death in Syrian state media.
Assad's father Hafez was born in Qardaha, and Latakia province remains a stronghold of support for his government.
It is also a heartland for the Alawite sect, an off-shoot of Shiite Islam and the minority community to which Assad belongs.
More than 210,000 people have been killed in Syria since the beginning of the conflict in March 2011.
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