Documents released recently by the US National Security Agency (NSA) reveal that senior Syrian military official Brigadier General Mahmoud Suleiman was assassinated by Israeli special forces in 2008.

The revelation, based on documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was initially reported Wednesday by The Intercept.

Suleiman was gunned down in August 2008 on a beach near Syria’s western port city of Tartus. The incident has been ignored by Israel ever since.

According to an entry at the NSA’s internal version of Wikipedia, called Intellipedia, the assassination, carried out by “Israeli naval commandos,” marks the “first known instance of Israel targeting a legitimate government official.”

There exist more details of the assassination in a “manhunting timeline” of NSA’s intelligence repository.

According to the Syrian government, Suleiman worked in the fields of defense and security in the capital Damascus.

WikiLeaks secret cable released in 2010 reveal that the US embassy in Damascus at the time deemed Israel as the most likely element behind the move.

According to The Intercept, the classification markings of the documents indicate that the top commander had been spotted through surveillance.

Labeled SI, the documents contain intelligence gathered by monitoring communications signals.

Suleiman was shot in the head and neck by a silenced weapon on a beach at al-Rimal al-Zahabiya resort near Tartus.

Six months earlier, Imad Mughniyeh, a commander of Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement, was killed in Damascus during a CIA-Mossad operation.