The former United Nations secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali has died, the security council has said.

Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian, was 93 and served one five-year term as UN chief from 1992 to 1996. He was succeeded by Kofi Annan.

Venezuela’s UN ambassador, Rafael Dario Ramírez Carreño, the current holder of the security council’s rotating presidency, made the announcement on Tuesday. No further details were given.

The 15-member body observed a minute’s silence.

Boutros-Ghali was the UN’s first secretary general from Africa and organised the first massive UN relief operation for the famine in Somalia, but success eluded him there and elsewhere.

He was criticized for the UN’s failure to act during the 1994 Rwandan genocide and for not pushing hard enough for UN intervention to end Angola’s civil war.

During the Bosnian war, he shocked many in besieged Sarajevo when he said he was not trying to belittle the horrors in the country, but that there were other nations where the “total dead was greater than here”.