Special report: Milosevic found dead at The Hague detention center

    

Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic (Xinhua Photo/file)

BRUSSELS, April 5 (Xinhua) -- Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic died of heart failure and had not been poisoned, according to the final autopsy and toxicology findings released by the Dutch authorities on Wednesday.

    "The public prosecutor's department in The Hague has closed the investigation into the death of Mr Milosevic. The public prosecutor has come to the conclusion that Mr Milosevic died a natural death and that there are no indications that the death resulted from crime," The Hague District Public Prosecutor's Office said in a statement.

    The Dutch Forensic Institute (NFI), which carried out an autopsy on Milosevic on March 12, the day after he was found dead in the United Nations (UN) detention center near The Hague, has confirmed that the 64-year-old former Serbian leader died of a heart attack.

    "In conformance with the earlier mentioned preliminary findings, the NFI has now definitely come to the conclusion that the cause of death was cardiac arrest," the statement said.

    "During the autopsy serious heart diseases were diagnosed which caused the cardiac arrest. There were no signs of external violence," it added.

    Milosevic had been held in the prison since he was transferred to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague in June 2001. He was found dead on his bed in his cell on March 11.

    Although preliminary autopsy results have showed that Milosevic died of heart failure, his family has insisted that he had been murdered.

    However, the toxicological examination into the cause of death has found "no indications that showed poisoning and neither were toxicological factors found that might have provoked a cardiac arrest," the final report said.

    A number of the medicines prescribed to Milosevic were found in the body material, but not in toxic concentrations, it concluded.

    No traces of medicines that had not been prescribed were found.

    It is also unlikely that rifampicine had been taken or administered several days prior to the death, the report said.

    The toxicology tests were ordered because various blood tests, previously in January 2006, had shown the use by Milosevic of non-prescribed medicines.

    Information from the war crimes tribunal in The Hague also showed that in December 2005 unprescribed medicines were found in his cell.

    Following Milosevic's death, his lawyer informed the police that Milosevic had suspected that he was being poisoned.

    The Dutch report said Milosevic had been found motionless on his bed in his cell at around 10 a.m. on March 11. At 10.30 a.m. a physician of the UN Penitentiary Institution certified his death, after which the medical examiner was called in at the request of the Tribunal.

    The time of the death is, according to the report of the medical examiner, between 7 and 9 a.m..

    The Dutch Forensic Institute requested an independent German institute in Bonn, the German Institut fur Gerichtsmedizin, to perform the toxicology examination again.

    The institute reached the same conclusions as the NFI, the report said.

    The ICTY's president, Judge Fausto Pocar, on Wednesday welcomed the final results of the Dutch authorities' investigation into Milosevic's death.

    As all results confirmed that Milosevic died from natural causes, the internal enquiry ordered on March 11 by Pocar will focus its attention on issues relating to the medical treatment provided to Milosevic while in the tribunal's detention facility, the tribunal said in the statement.

    "The internal inquiry expects to conclude its investigation on these issues shortly," it added. Enditem