BREAKING NEWS:DICTATOR Milosevic DIES IN PRISON CELLS!!!
By ANTHONY DEUTSCH and DUSAN STOJANOVIC THE HAGUE, Netherlands Mar 11, 2006 (AP)— Former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was found dead in his prison cell Saturday, abruptly ending his four-year U.N. war crimes trial for orchestrating a decade of conflict that killed 250,000 people and tore the Yugoslav federation asunder. He was 64.
A picture of former Yugoslav
A leader of beguiling charm and cunning ruthlessness, the man reviled by the United States as "the butcher of the Balkans" was a hero to many Serbs despite losing four wars and impoverishing his people in the 1990s while trying to create a "Greater Serbia" linking Serbia with Serb-dominated areas of Croatia and Bosnia.
Milosevic apparently died of natural causes, according to the U.N. tribunal that was trying him on 66 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. His chronic heart ailments and high blood pressure had caused numerous long recesses.
His death came nearly five years after he was arrested by Serb authorities and extradited to The Hague as the first sitting head of state ever to be indicted for war crimes.
It meant there would be no judicial verdict for the leader accused of ethnic massacres and other atrocities in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo and was sure to increase criticism of the tribunal for what has been a long, expensive and ultimately wasted proceeding.
The trial, which began in February 2002, will be terminated, tribunal spokeswoman Alexandra Milenov said.
The chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, expressed regret, saying she believed she would have won a conviction.
"I also regret it for the victims, the thousands of victims, who have been waiting for justice," Del Ponte told Swiss Television DRS while visiting her native Switzerland.
Former President Clinton, whose administration confronted Milosevic's regime, also lamented that no verdict would be reached.
"I am sorry that his trial will not be completed, and that he did not acknowledge and apologize for his crimes before his death. Nevertheless, his capture and trial will serve as a reminder that egregious crimes against humanity will not be tolerated," Clinton said in a statement released by his office in New York.
Milosevic was accused of being behind a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against non-Serbs during the wars that erupted as the Yugoslav federation began breaking apart in 1991, and his death was cheered by many in the Balkans.
"Finally, we have some reason to smile. God is fair," said Hajra Catic, who heads an association of women who lost loved ones when ethnic Serb troops slaughtered 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the eastern enclave of Srebrenica in 1995.
In Serbia, where many people praised Milosevic for trying to preserve Serb dominance, supporters declared his death a "huge loss."
The tribunal said a guard at the U.N. jail in suburban Scheveningen found Milosevic's body between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. Saturday. The timing of his death was not released. An autopsy will be conducted Sunday by Dutch officials with a pathologist from Serbia-Montenegro in attendance.
Posted on Saturday, March 11, 2006 (Archive on Tuesday, April 25, 2006)
Posted by PANDERRYMBAI Contributed by PANDERRYMBAI
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