Boutros Boutros-Ghali, a veteran Egyptian diplomat who helped negotiate his country's landmark peace deal with Israel but then clashed with the United States when he served a single term as UN secretary-general, has died. He was 93.

Mr Boutros-Ghali, the scion of a prominent Egyptian Christian political family, was the first UN chief from the African continent.

He stepped into the post in 1992 at a time of dramatic world changes, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and the beginning of a unipolar era dominated by the US.

But after four years of frictions with the Clinton administration, the US blocked his renewal in the post in 1996, making him the only secretary-general to serve a single term. He was replaced by Ghanaian Kofi Annan.

The current president of the UN Security Council, Venezuelan ambassador Rafael Ramirez, announced Mr Boutros-Ghali's death at the start of a session on Tuesday on Yemen's humanitarian crisis. The 15 council members stood in a silent tribute.

Mr Boutros-Ghhali died on Tuesday at a Cairo hospital, Egypt's state news agency said. He had been admitted to the hospital after suffering a broken pelvis, the Al-Ahram newspaper reported last Thursday.

Mr Boutros-Ghali's spell in the United Nations remain controversial.

Some see him as seeking to establish the UN's independence from the US while others blame him for misjudgments in the failures to prevent genocides in Africa and the Balkans, and mismanagement of reform in the world body.

In his farewell speech to the UN, Mr Boutros-Ghali said he had thought when he took the post the time was right for the United Nations to play an effective role in a world no longer divided into warring Cold War camps.

"But the middle years of this half decade were deeply troubled," he said. "Disillusion set in."

In a 2005 interview with the Associated Press, Mr Boutros-Ghali called the 1994 massacre in Rwanda - in which half a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed in 100 days - "my worst failure at the United Nations".

He blamed the US, Britain, France and Belgium for paralysing action by setting impossible conditions for intervention.

Then-US president Bill Clinton and other world leaders were opposed to taking strong action to beef up UN peacekeepers in the tiny central African nation or intervening to stop the massacres.

Mr Boutros-Ghali also came under fire for the July 1995 Serb slaughter of 8,000 Muslims in the UN-declared "safe zone" of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia just before the end of the war.

In 1999, families of the victims listed Mr Boutros-Ghali as one of the international officials they wanted to sue for responsibility in the deaths.

His legacy was also stained in investigations into corruption in the UN oil-for-food programme for Iraq, which he played a large role in creating. Three suspects in the probe were linked to Mr Boutros-Ghali either by family relationship or friendship.

Noted for his dignified bearing and Old World style, Mr Boutros-Ghali was the son of one of Egypt's most important Coptic Christian families. His grandfather, Boutros Ghali Pasha, was Egypt's prime minister from 1908 to 1910.

Born on November 14, 1922, Mr Boutros-Ghali studied in Cairo and Paris and became an academic, specialising in international law.

In 1977, then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat named him minister of state without portfolio, shortly before Mr Sadat's landmark visit to Israel to launch peace negotiations.

Mr Sadat's rapprochement with Israel brought harsh criticism from across Egypt's political spectrum. His foreign minister, Ismail Fahmi, resigned in protest at normalisation with Israel, so Mr Sadat turned to Mr Boutros-Ghali, naming him acting foreign minister and minister of state for foreign affairs.

Mr Boutros-Ghali played a major role in subsequent negotiations that produced the Camp David peace framework agreements in September 1978 and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in March 1979, the first such between an Arab state and Israel.

President Hosni Mubarak, who succeeded Mr Sadat in October 1981, kept Mr Boutros-Ghali in the same post.

But Mr Boutros-Ghlai was never promoted to the post of foreign minister because it was considered too controversial to have a Christian in the key post of a Muslim majority country.

After leaving the UN, Mr Boutros-Ghali served from 1998 to 2002 as secretary-general of La Francophonie - a grouping of French-speaking nations.

In 2004, he was named the president of Egypt's new human rights council, a body created by Mr Mubarak amid US pressure on Arab nations to adopt political and democratic reforms.

He was married to Lea, an Egyptian Jew. They have no children.