THE HAGUE, (AFP) – A Dutch inquest into the death of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic has “so far” found no indication that he was poisoned, the UN war crimes tribunal said yesterday.

Deflecting allegations that Milosevic was poisoned, or that he had unknowingly ingested a drug that countered his heart medication, the tribunal’s president Fausto Pocar also told a packed news conference that no traces of the drug rifampicin were found in forensic tests.

However, Pocar and the prison’s overseer Hans Holthuis were peppered with questions about how rifampicin – a powerful antibiotic that is known to counter the effects of heart medication – came to be found in Milosevic’s blood in recent months, and how tribunal authorities reacted when they learned of it.

“Video surveillance is not the best way to observe a patient with a heart problem,” Holthuis said. “This was dealt with as expeditiously as we could. This is no reason to be alarmed.”

Milosevic died suddenly of a heart attack while nearing the end of his trial for war crimes, including genocide during the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Holthuis, admitting that “contraband” had been discovered in Milosevic’s cell before he died, said: “We did take the necessary action when this contraband was found in a regular search. (Warden Timothy McFadden) took action immediately, but I do not want to go into details.”

He called McFadden “extremely professional detention unit commander” and said Milosevic had been kept under “effective scrutiny.”

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) voiced suspicions after Milosevic died that he was secretly using rifampicin in the hope of becoming ill enough to be accorded a medical evacuation to Russia.

The court in December refused his request to be sent to Moscow fearing that Milosevic could possibly find shelter in Russia, where his widow has lived since 2003, and never return to The Hague.

The toxicological tests were conducted by the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), which performed the autopsy, identifying the immediate cause of death as a heart attack, but many of Milosevic’s supporters, notably in his native Serbia and in Russia, charged that he had been murdered.