Pathologists carry out post mortem on Milosevic
Dutch pathologists were conducting a post mortem examination today on Slobodan Milosevic’s remains to find out what killed the former Yugoslav leader, found dead in his jail cell a day earlier.
Tribunal President Fausto Pocar said he ordered the post mortem and a toxicological examination after a Dutch coroner failed on Saturday to establish the cause of death. Serbia sent a pathologist to observe the examination at the Netherlands Forensic Institute.
Milosevic, 64, was found dead on Saturday morning in his bed at the UN jail near The Hague. The tribunal said earlier there were no outward signs of suicide or unnatural causes of death.
But chief UN prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said suicide cannot be ruled out until the results are in – probably late tonight or early tomorrow.
“Yu have the choice between normal, natural death and suicide,” she told reporters at the tribunal where Milosevic had been standing trial for more than four years.
A close Milosevic associate who said he spoke to the ex-Serbian president on Friday described Milosevic as defiant hours before his death.
“He told me, ’Don’t you worry: They will not destroy me or break me. I shall defeat them all,”’ Milorad Vucelic, a Socialist Party official, said in Belgrade.
“But it was obvious he was very ill.”
One of Milosevic’s legal advisers told Serbia’s independent B-92 radio that the late ex-president feared he was being poisoned. But Del Ponte refused to comment on the allegations.
Del Ponte said he regretted Milosevic’s death just before the completion of his four-year-long trial on war crimes and genocide charges.
“It is a great pity for justice that the trial will not be completed and no verdict will be rendered,” she said. His death “deprives victims of the justice they need and deserve”.
Milosevic suffered chronic high blood pressure worsened by the stress of conducting his own defence against 66 counts of war crimes, including genocide, in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo during Yugoslavia’s violent break-up in the 1990s. His health problems repeatedly delayed the trial, which entered its fifth year in February and was due to wind up this summer.
Family members accused the court of responsibility for his death when it refused to free him for treatment at a Moscow heart clinic, despite guarantees by Russia that he would return to complete his trial that began in February 2002.
Serb authorities arrested Milosevic nearly five years ago and extradited him to The Hague as the first sitting head of state ever to be indicted for war crimes.
A week before his death, convicted former Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic, a star witness in the Milosevic trial, killed himself in the same prison.
Milosevic’s death meant there would be no judicial verdict for the leader accused of ethnic massacres and other Balkan atrocities, and was sure to increase criticism of the tribunal for what has been a long and expensive trial.
