Slobodan Milošević died on March 11, 2006 in The Hague.
On this day in 2006 the former president of Serbia and FR Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević, died in the custody of the Hague Tribunal in Scheveningen.
Milošević was in The Hague on charges of war crimes committed in the wars in the former SFRY. He died of a heart attack in the custody of the Tribunal, and lawyer Zdenko Tomanović, who defended Milosevic, told what happened the day before the former president’s death.
“The day before he was found dead in his cell, Milosevic asked me to come to him in prison a little earlier. He asked me to take his handwritten letter to the Russian embassy, with the request that the letter be given to Minister Sergey Lavrov. In that letter, he complained that he was being poisoned at the Tribunal and asked that Russia save and protect him. I immediately submitted that letter to the Russian embassy, and the receipt of that letter was later confirmed by Lavrov himself. However, a day later Milosevic was found dead“, Tomanović told Nedeljnik a few years ago.
Tomanović was the only Serb who saw Milošević dead in his cell. “All the doors in the prison were closed, all the cells were closed, not a word was heard, not a sound. When they finally unlocked his cell, Milosevic was lying dead on the bed, partially covered by a sheet, with an open book and glasses on a chair next to the bed.“, Tomanović said then.
Milošević was buried in Požarevac in the yard of his wife Mirjana Marković’s family home. The family and high-ranking officials of the Socialist Party of Serbia requested that the former president be buried in Belgrade with state honors, but the then city and state authorities did not allow it.
None of the immediate family members attended the funeral, which took place without a religious ceremony, because, as they stated, they did not receive sufficient guarantees for their safety.. The body of Slobodan Milošević was delivered from The Hague to Belgrade on March 15, 2006, and the following day the coffin with the body was exhibited in the Museum “25. Maj”, within the museum complex in the Belgrade neighborhood of Dedinje.
Thousands of people passed by the casket. On the same day, tens of thousands of supporters of the former president of Serbia and Yugoslavia gathered in front of the National Assembly in the center of Belgrade, where a coffin with his body was displayed on stage.
(WORLD)