Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali dies at 93

NEW YORK, Feb. 16 (UPI) -- Former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an accomplished Egyptian diplomat, died Tuesday at age 93.

U.N. Security Council President Rafael Dario Ramirez Carreno, Venezuela's ambassador to the U.N., announced Boutros-Ghali's death. He died at a hospital in Cairo after being admitted with a broken pelvis.

The 15-member Security Council observed a minute of silence. Boutros-Ghali was the U.N.'s sixth secretary general, the first Arab, named in 1992 to serve a five-year term amid a time of increasing influence for the governmental organization.

Boutros-Ghali served a controversial term, particularly marred by perceived U.N. inaction over the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the 1990s Angolan civil war.

In Egypt, he became prime minister for Foreign Affairs in 1991 after serving as minister of state for Foreign Affairs since October 1977. Previously, he was elected as a member of Egypt's parliament in 1987.

After leaving the U.N., Boutros-Ghali served as the secretary general of La Francophonie, a bloc of French-speaking nations, from 1998 until 2002. In 2004, former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak named him as president of a new Egyptian human rights council amid U.S. pressure on Arab nations to enact democratic reform.