Syria: Damascus bombing live - Telegraph If additional reports prove true of the death of Asef Shawkat, his deputy and President Bashar al-Assad's brother-in-law, the regime is staring its end in the face. The Assad family has always been fractious and Mr Shawkat rowed with Bashar and his brother, Maher, but they had presented a united front and can hardly claim to be winning the war when their most important military functionaries are being killed. It has always been claimed - rightly - that the Syrian regime had a bigger base of support than, say, Colonel Gaddafi in Libya or even President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. It might be truer to say that as well as having a fanatical core of support from the Assad's family's Alawite minority, it was a better organised regime, with a more efficient and more loyal army. But if that army cannot protect its own senior figures - and state news agencies are reporting that today's killer was a Defence Ministry bodyguard - that assertion no longer holds true. There is no reason for senior officers who are not personally loyal to the Assads to go down with the sinking ship, which is no doubt why the number of generals crossing the border to Turkey has grown dramatically in the past couple of weeks. President Assad may hold on for a few more months yet, though the scale of the immediate threat to his rule has escalated dramatically in the last month alone. But it is hard to see how he can recover from this. 12.35 France has denounced Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's struggle to stay in power as futile and raised concerns about mounting violence in the conflict-torn country. The situation in Syria is worsening day by day as the violence intensifies. Bashar al-Assad must understand that his struggle to retain power is futile and that nothing will stop the Syrian people's march to a democratic future," French foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said. 12.31 The Free Syrian Army has responded to the attack, reports al-Jazeera, with a spokesman Qassim Saadedine claiming warning: "This is the volcano we talked about, we have just started." 12.28 Some doubts being raised now as to whether this was in fact a suicide bombing. Syrian opposition leader Kamal al-Labwani told al-Arabiya, a pan-Arab satellite channel, that a member of the rebel Free Syrian Army planted a TNT and C-4-based device inside the building ahead of the meeting, and then detonated the bomb remotely before fleeing to safety. 12.27 Hezbollah TV reports that Head of National Security General Hisham Ikhtiyar has been injured 12.14 According to Reuters, Syrian rebel Islamist group Liwa Al-Islam has claimed responsibility for the attack. 12.12 The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has just confirmed that Dawoud Rajiha has been killed and many others injured, some seriously. The Observatory said reports indicate it was a car bomb, as windows were shattered in surrounding buildings. 12.06 Reports coming in from Syria that a brother-in-law of President Bashar al-Assad, was also killed in the bomb attack which targeted a meeting of Assad's top security and military officials. Assef Shawkat reportedly died in a Damascus hospital where he was taken after the attack, according to Hezbollah's al-Manar television and a security source in Syria 11.55 This from Telegraph's Foreign Affairs Correspondent Damien McElroy, who is following developments: An escalation of attacks by the Free Syria Army inside the gates of Damascus has posed the greatest challenge to the regime in the 16-month uprising. Gen Rajha, was an elderly Christian who was see as an ultra-loyalist member of the security elite. Control of the security services is tightly controlled by the Assad family. Major Gen Mohammad Ibrahim Shaar, the Interior minister, was forced to go on live television to deny rumours that he had been killed by the opposition in May. 11.50 Reports of a suicide bombing that struck at the heart of the country's security establishment as fighting intensifies in the Syrian capital. The Syrian defence minister, General Dawoud Rajiha, was killed in the attack.