José Eduardo dos Santos, Angola's second president who ruled the mineral-rich state for almost four decades, has died aged 79, the government says.
He died in Spain where he was treated after suffering a cardiac arrest.
Dos Santos will be remembered for ending a long-running civil war in the early 2000s - his supporters dubbed him the "architect of peace".
But his legacy is soiled by high levels of corruption and human rights violations while he was in power.
Having graduated in petroleum engineering in the Soviet Union in 1969, Dos Santos was only 37 years old when he became Angola's president a decade later, following the death of the first president, António Agostinho Neto.
At the time, just four years after gaining independence in 1975, the country was wracked by a civil war between the two groups that had fought Portuguese colonisation - Dos Santos' MPLA and Unita.
The war lasted for 27 years and ravaged the country. About 500,000 people are believed to have died in the conflict.
It also drew in foreign powers, with South Africa - then under white-minority rule - sending troops to support Unita, while Cuban forces intervened on the government's side.
Dos Santos presided over a Marxist-oriented one-party state until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War led to the MPLA and Unita signing a peace accord.
It saw Dos Santos and Unita's Jonas Savimbi face off against each other in the first multi-party elections in Angola since independence.
Dos Santos defeated Savimbi by a narrow margin, resulting in a second round being called, but Savimbi boycotted it, choosing to take up arms again.
Just over a decade later, in February 2002, Dos Santos's troops killed Savimbi and a peace deal was later negotiated with the new Unita leadership.
"Not one more shot, we have to preserve the people alive and negotiate peace," Dos Santos said at the time, when he was about to formally declare the end of the war.
Thus, a new country was born.
Reconstruction and reconciliation were Dos Santos's main goals. At the time, he enjoyed considerable popularity, as demonstrated by the victory of the MPLA in the 2008 elections with 82% of the vote.
Source BBC
