On Sunday the 64-year-old former Serbian and Yugoslav president's lawyer revealed a six-page letter -- dated last Friday, 24 hours before his death -- that Milosevic wrote to the Russian government alleging he was being deliberately administered the wrong drugs for his illnesses.

"Persons that are giving me the drug for the treatment of leprosy surely cannot be treating me. Especially those persons against whom I have defended my country in the war and who also have an interest in silencing me can likewise not be treating me," Milosevic said in a handwritten letter to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.

Milosevic had a long history of heart disease, hypertension and high blood pressure. He was also found to be ignoring Dutch medical advice while on trial for the past four years and to be taking drugs other than those prescribed. His family has a history of suicide; his parents and a favourite uncle killed themselves.

Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor in The Hague, said on Sunday that Milosevic, found dead in his cell on Saturday morning, might have killed himself. "According to our valuations, [the trial] would have ended with a verdict requesting he be shut away for life. Perhaps he wanted to avoid all that," Del Ponte told the Italian paper, la Repubblica. But tribunal sources said the most likely explanation for his death was natural causes.

While Milosevic claimed in his letter that he was being deliberately administered the wrong medicine, he also has a record of taking unprescribed drugs and refusing treatment advised by his Dutch doctors.

Eighteen months ago, during courtroom wrangles over whether he was fit enough to stand trial on 66 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the judges in the case ordered two independent medical examinations.

They found that Milosevic was occasionally refusing to take the drugs prescribed for his condition, and taking other drugs he said he got from his "Serbian doctor". Last November, Milosevic staged an hour-long harangue in the court, arguing that the Del Ponte prosecution team was "the source of his ill-health" and that he was being "exposed to torture."

He demanded that he be released to receive medical treatment in Russia where his wife and son live. The court denied the request last month, ruling that medical treatment in The Netherlands was quite adequate. Ever since the November outburst, Mirko Klarin, a long-time observer of the trials in The Hague, has argued that Milosevic had no intention of seeing the trial through to its conclusion, which was expected in a few months. "This is his final revenge on the tribunal," said Klarin.

Serbian nationalists and Milosevic loyalists seized on the mystery to claim Milosevic was poisoned, though it is not clear who had anything to gain from his death.

On Sunday night a spokesperson for the war crimes tribunal, Alexandra Milenov, said the postmortem revealed Milosevic had been suffering from two heart conditions. She did not name the conditions, but said the doctors determined they might have caused the heart attack. She also said toxicological tests were still to be carried out.

Asked if poisoning could have caused the heart attack, Milenov said it was too early to draw conclusions.

She said that the inquiry into Milosevic's death, ordered by tribunal president Fausto Pocar, was continuing. "I think we should also wait for that until we come to any final conclusions," she said, adding that the final report was expected to be released in a matter of days. - Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague on Saturday announced that Milosevic had been found dead on his bed in his cell at the UN detention unit in Scheveningen.

Milosevic, 64, has suffered from high blood pressure and heart problems.

On Feb. 24, the tribunal refused Milosevic's request to be temporarily released to Moscow in order to undergo medical treatment.

In a trial that started on Feb. 12, 2002, Milosevic faced 66 charges of war crimes, including

In the report by state broadcaster NOS, a lawyer and commentator for the channel, Heikelina Verrijn Stuart, said she had confirmation that doctors first noticed the medicine in his blood in January.

Stuart said the drugs interfered with other medicine Milosevic was taking for high blood pressure and vascular disease.

"They were counterproductive," said Stuart, a lawyer who has closely followed the proceedings. "What we do know is that this is the cause of death and you can't say that it was really a case of natural death."

Stuart said the tribunal only learned of the presence of the drug in his blood last week, on March 7.

"It's naturally a riddle," she said.

Dutch doctors conducted a post mortem examination on Milosevic's remains on Sunday, but the results were not expected to be released until Monday.

A 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.

Doctors found traces of the drug when they were searching for an answer to why Milosevic's medication for high blood pressure was not working, the report said.

© Copyright Press Association Ltd 2006.

The media has spun this to make out as if Milosevic deliberately took the wrong drug so he could seek specialist treatment in Moscow and delay his trial. This is frankly absurd. Milosevic only had access to the drugs provided to him by UN appointed doctors and took them under close surveillance. Are we to believe that Milosevic had managed to set up a secret drugs lab in his closely watched prison prison cell and then substituted the drugs while under constant monitoring?

- Milan Babic, a former Croatian Serb leader who testified against Milosevic was "suicided" just six days before Milosevic's death. According to the BBC, tribunal spokeswoman Alexandra Milenov said he had given no indication that he was contemplating suicide. "There was nothing unusual in his demeanor," she said. Another Hague detainee, Slavko Dokmanovic, supposedly killed himself in 1998.

- Allegations of suicide were dismissed by British lawyer, Steven Kay QC, who said Milosevic had told him before he was found dead: "I have not come all this way not to see it to the end."

- The Globalists have wanted to eliminate Milosevic for a long time. Former MI6 agent Richard Tomlinson said he saw documents in 1992 that discussed assassinating Milosevic by means of a staged car accident, where the driver would be blinded by a flash of light and remote controlled brake failure enacted to cause the crash. This exact same technique was utilized for real in the murder of Princess Diana.

Milosevic was a loose cannon with intimate knowledge of the criminality of the Globalists after the IMF/Bilderberg coup de 'tat in Serbia in the 1990's.

In March 2002, Milosevic presented the Hague tribunal with FBI documents proving that the United States government and NATO provided financial and military support for Al-Qaeda to aid the Kosovo Liberation Army in its war against Serbia.

This didn't go down too well at the Pentagon and the White House, who at the time were trying to sell a war on terror and gearing up to justify invading Iraq.

Milosevic made several speeches in which he discussed how a group of shadowy internationalists had caused the chaos in the Balkans because it was the next step on the road to a "new world order."

During a February 2000 Serbian Congressional speech, Milosevic stated,

"Small Serbia and people in it have demonstrated that resistance is possible. Applied at a broader level, it was organized primarily as a moral and political rebellion against tyranny, hegemony, monopolism, generating hatred, fear and new forms of violence and revenge against champions of freedom among nations and people, such a resistance would stop the escalation of modern time inquisition. Uranium bombs, computer manipulations, drug-addicted young assassins and bribed of blackmailed domestic thugs, promoted to the allies of the new world order, these are the instruments of inquisition which have surpassed, in their cruelty and cynicism, all previous forms of revengeful violence committed against the mankind in the past."

Milosevic was far from an angel, but evidence linking him to genocides like Srebrenica, in which 7,000 Muslims died, was continually proven to be fraudulent. In fact, Srebrenica was supposedly a 'UN safe zone', yet just like Rwanda, UN peacekeepers deliberately withdrew and allowed the massacre to unfold, then blamed Milosevic.

Milosevic's exposure of UN involvement in the Srebrenica massacre was another reason why tribunal transcripts were heavily edited and censored, and another contributing factor towards his murder.

The official said prison authorities repeatedly found banned material in his cell, including alcohol and unprescribed drugs.

Warden Timothy McFadden refused interview requests and U.N. tribunal spokeswoman Alexandra Milenov said the court could not comment "because the investigation into Milosevic's death is ongoing."

The tribunal official, who has access to confidential documents on Milosevic's medication use, said two doctors concluded the former Serb leader was intentionally taking drugs that undermined the prescribed medication for his heart ailment.

Milosevic, who was defending himself against 66 counts of war crimes, was allowed to work in a private office where he could meet privately with witnesses and legal advisers, making it impossible to monitor material they may have smuggled in to him, the official said.

A Dutch toxicologist, Donald Uges, said Monday that blood tests he conducted on samples taken from Milosevic earlier this year uncovered traces of a drug used to treat leprosy or tuberculosis that would neutralize the effects of the beta-blockers he was taking to control his blood pressure.

The official said other doctors had found similar results in their tests.

U.N. prosecutors complained as early as 2004 that Milosevic was defying his regime of prescribed medication and taking other drugs to manipulate his health to his advantage during court proceedings. The trial was repeatedly interrupted at critical points because of the defendant's ill health.

Four Russian medical experts traveled Tuesday to the Netherlands to examine the results, saying they distrusted the findings and the care Milosevic received from U.N. authorities.

The former president's son, Marko Milosevic, flew to the Netherlands to claim his father's body.

"He got killed. He didn't die. He got killed. There's a murder," Marko Milosevic told AP Television News on arriving in Amsterdam for the short drive to The Hague, where his father's body has kept at the National Forensic Institute since his death was discovered Saturday.

Milosevic, the Serbian strongman who presided over four Balkan wars and the breakup of Yugoslavia that cost some 250,000 lives, died of a heart attack, according to preliminary autopsy findings.

The results of a toxicological examination during the autopsy were due to be released in the coming days, said tribunal spokeswoman Alexandra Milenov.

In Courtroom 1 at the tribunal building, meanwhile, the case against Milosevic was declared closed Tuesday.

Judge Patrick Robinson, who repeatedly clashed with the combative defendant over four years, said Milosevic's "untimely passing ... terminates these proceedings." A formal order closing the file would be issued shortly, he said.

The two-minute hearing brought an abrupt end to the most important war crimes trial in 60 years, in a case that was meant to establish political responsibility for the worst crimes known to man _ genocide.

It was still unclear where Milosevic would be taken for burial. The family requested a state funeral in Belgrade _ although a ceremony with state honors was unlikely to be granted since it could become a rallying point for nationalists and Milosevic loyalists.

A Belgrade court suspended an arrest warrant for Slobodan Milosevic's wife, leading to a possible Belgrade funeral.

The court said Mirjana Markovic "will remain free and will not be taken into custody" after her lawyers deposited a bond worth $17,000 guaranteeing she would appear in court at a hearing that has not yet been scheduled.

Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica told the Beta news agency that the suspension of the arrest warrant enables Milosevic's funeral to be held in Belgrade.

"A funeral is a civilized act that should be respected," Kostunica said, but he did not elaborate on whether it actually would be held in the Serb capital.

Markovic left Serbia in February 2003 to join Marko Milosevic in Russia, and an Interpol arrest warrant was issued against her the same month over a real estate scandal. It was briefly revoked and later reinstated after she failed to appear in court in September 2005.

But, the court said, "on her arrival in the country, the defendant's passport will be impounded."

Markovic has said she would return to Serbia only if the arrest warrant was lifted.

But she has also indicated in recent interviews with Belgrade media that she had plans to return to Russia after the burial. The impounding of her passport would prevent her from leaving Serbia.

On Monday, Marko Milosevic raised the possibility of a temporary burial in Russia if the Serb government banned a Belgrade funeral.

Milosevic was the sixth war crimes suspect from the Balkans to die at The Hague. A week earlier, convicted former Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic, a star prosecution witness against Milosevic, killed himself in the same prison.