THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - The death of Slobodan Milosevic deprived victims of justice and made it more urgent to catch and extradite other Balkan leaders implicated in atrocities, the chief U.N. prosecutor said Sunday. Carla Del Ponte also said suicide could not be ruled out as the cause of his death until the results of the autopsy were released Sunday evening.
"You have the choice between normal, natural death and suicide," she said, declining to comment on speculation that Milosevic may have been poisoned.
Milosevic, 64, 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.
"It is a great pity for justice that the trial will not be completed and no verdict will be rendered," Del Ponte said.
She said the trials of eight other suspects indicted for the massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995 will help establish the record on Milosevic's involvement in the worst slaughter in Europe since World War II.
She said was "more urgent than ever" to arrest former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his top military officer, Ratko Mladic, who were indicted in 1995 on charges of orchestrating the massacre. Both remain at large.
Milosevic's 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.
His chronic heart ailments and high blood pressure had caused numerous long recesses in his trial on 66 counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Del Ponte said the trial had been close to completion. After 466 trial days, only 50 days remained and it was due to finish this spring, she told reporters at the U.N. Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Serbia sent a pathologist to observe the autopsy Sunday at the Netherlands Forensic Institute. Reporters were not allowed inside the institute, which is under the authority of the Dutch Justice Ministry. It was not known when the results of the examination would be released.
Milosevic's older brother, Borislav, said the family did not trust the tribunal to carry out an impartial autopsy. He also blamed the tribunal for his brother's death because it rejected his request to get medical treatment in Russia, which offered assurances that Milosevic would be returned to finish his trial.
Zdenko Tomanovic, the defendant's legal adviser, told Serbia's independent B-92 radio from The Hague that Slobodan Milosevic had complained that "someone wants to poison" him.
A leader of beguiling charm and cunning ruthlessness, Milosevic was reviled by the United States as "the butcher of the Balkans," but 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.
World leaders who dealt with Milosevic and many of the victims of the Balkan wars 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," said former President Bill Clinton, whose decision to authorize NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999 helped bring Milosevic down.
"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.
Milosevic's trial and Saddam Hussein's war crimes proceeding in Iraq were widely seen as together constituting the most important legal test for the international community since German and Japanese leaders were tried after World War II.
Both trials drew stiff criticism over frequent interruptions and the ability of the defendants to use the courtroom as a stage to launch vitriolic anti-Western diatribes. Reveling in the spotlight, Milosevic insisted on being his own defense lawyer.
He was able to stay as the Serbs' leader for 13 years despite a crumbling economy and increasing international isolation. He once described himself as the "Ayatollah Khomeini of Serbia," assuring his prime minister, Milan Panic, that "the Serbs will follow me no matter what."
But in the end, his people abandoned him: first in October 2000, when he was unable to convince most Yugoslavs that he had staved off electoral defeat by Vojislav Kostunica, and again on April 1, 2001, when he surrendered after a 26-hour standoff to face criminal charges.
