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I was one of the last western journalists to meet Slobodan Milosevic. Having been called to The Hague as a potential witness, I spent an hour in his cell in January last year. Like most who met him, I found him polite and intelligent. "We will win," he told me. "Freedom is a universal value. They have no evidence against me." If the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia were a proper court of law, the charges against him would have been dismissed long ago. Unfortunately, it is a highly politicised organ, created on the initiative of the very...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader indicted for war crimes for orchestrating the Balkan wars of the 1990s, was found dead in his prison cell near The Hague, the United Nations tribunal said Saturday.

BELGRADE, Serbia-Montenegro - Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader on trial for alleged war crimes, was found dead in his prison cell at the U.N. tribunal in The Hague, Belgrade's B-92 and Serbia's state radio said Saturday. He was 65. A U.N. war crimes prosecution official in the Dutch capital, speaking on condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the media, confirmed the report to The Associated Press.

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - A 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.'"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...

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, the so-called "butcher of the Balkans" being tried for war crimes after orchestrating a decade of bloodshed during his country's breakup, was found dead Saturday in his prison cell. He was 64. Milosevic, who suffered chronic heart ailments and high blood pressure, apparently died of natural causes and was found in his bed, the U.N. tribunal said, without giving an exact time of death. He had been examined following frequent complaints of fatigue or ill health that delayed his trial, but the tribunal could not immediately say when his last medical checkup...

War Crimes Fugitive Believed Cornered By DUSAN STOJANOVIC, Associated Press Writer War crimes fugitive Gen. Ratko Mladic, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity stemming from the Bosnian war, has been located and authorities are negotiating his surrender, a top state security official said Tuesday. Mladic was located but "he has yet not been arrested," the official, who is close to the operation to locate Mladic, told The Associated Press. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. The state news agency Tanjug reported that Mladic was arrested in Belgrade and being...

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Top Bosnian Serb war crimes fugitive General Ratko Mladic has been arrested, the official Serbian news agency Tanjug on Tuesday quoted a local television station in Bosnia's Serb Republic as saying. No immediate confirmation of the report was available. Tanjug said TV BN reported the wartime Bosnian Serb Army commander had been taken into custody in the Serbian capital Belgrade and was being transferred via the northeast Bosnian city of Tuzla to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague. An earlier report by Belgrade's "Studio B" television said Mladic had been located "in the area of...

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was an act of aggression rather than an attempt to save ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, former Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov told Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes trial Monday. Ryzhkov was the first high profile witness to testify for Milosevic since the former Yugoslav president won back the right to lead his own defense earlier this month. Ryzhkov, like dozens of other witnesses, had initially refused to testify after the court appointed two lawyers in September to defend the former Serb strongman to prevent his ill health causing more delays to the...

Serb accused in massacre denied refugee status Friday, September 17, 2004 - Page A8 Windsor, Ont. -- A Serbian man accused of participating in a gruesome 1999 massacre in Kosovo that involved the killing of 19 women and children was being held in a Canadian jail last night. Dejan Demirovic, who had been living in Windsor while waiting for his refugee claim to be heard by a Canadian court, was ordered deported this week, CBC News reported yesterday. Five years ago, 19 people were lined up against a wall and sprayed with bullets in a village in Kosovo. Saranda Bogujevci,...