The Milosevic Post Mortem

Medical examiners at the Hague are running an autopsy to determine Slobodan Milosevic's cause of death. It wasn't by lethal injection or hanging. That's for sure.

It was most likely by natural causes, despite the protestations by his attorney, who claims that Milosevic believed that his jailers were poisoning him. No doubt that he and his supporters will not accept the findings by the medical examiners either. They'll continue to claim that he was murdered, and no amount of forensic evidence will be sufficient.

Others blogging Milosevic's demise: Lawyers, Guns, and Money wonders what kind of precedent is being set by going after dictators (he mentioned Pinochet) who have willingly stepped down - only to be prosecuted for their crimes anyway. Good question, and one I haven't seen posited anywhere else though Milosevic doesn't exactly fall into this category seeing how he was completely unrepentant and forced multiple wars in the Balkans to remain in power. Does their prosecution despite peacefully stepping down actually encourage dictators to remain in power longer because they have no incentive to step down? Well, there's not much incentive to step down in the first place.

The Moderate Voice also has some interesting thoughts. Diggers' Realm and Jay Currie have more.

UPDATE:
The plot thickens:

Traces of a drug used to treat leprosy and tuberculosis were found in a blood sample taken in recent months from former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, a Dutch news report said, citing an unidentified "adviser" to the U.N. war crimes tribunal.

The report came hours after Milosevic's legal adviser showed journalists a letter the late Serb leader wrote Friday, one day before his body was discovered in prison, alleging that he was being poisoned.

The report was on the text service of the Dutch state broadcaster, NOS. It did not identify its source further.

Dutch doctors conducted an autopsy Sunday on Milosevic's remains, but the results were not expected to be released until Monday.

The tribunal spokeswoman said she could not comment on the news report. "We don't have any information. We simply have to wait for the results" of the autopsy report, said Alexandra Milenov.

Meanwhile, the early reports indicate that Milosevic died of a heart attack.

heart attack killed Slobodan Milosevic in his jail cell, the U.N. war crimes tribunal said, citing preliminary findings from Dutch pathologists who conducted a nearly eight-hour autopsy Sunday on the former Yugoslav leader.

The tribunal said pathologists had determined that "Milosevic's cause of death was a 'myocardial infarction'" - a medical term for heart attack.

Found dead in his cell Saturday morning, the 64-year-old Milosevic had suffered from heart ailments and high blood pressure, and his bad health caused numerous breaks in his four-year, $200 million trial before the tribunal.

Some wondered if suicide might have been an out for the man accused of causing wars that killed 250,000 people during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. And a legal adviser said Milosevic feared he was being poisoned.

We're going to have to wait for a toxicology report to see whether the lawyer's theory bears out, or that there was foul play involved.