"Milosevic was poisoning himself while in Hague custody"

"Milosevic was poisoning himself while in Hague custody"

According to her, Milosevic did this using the drug Rifampicin, with the goal of deteriorating his own health in order to be released pending the outcome of his war crimes trial - "and then escape to Russia."

According to Hartmann, Milosevic - who died in 2006 while the ICTY detention unit - was thus poisoning himself with the drug "someone" had smuggled to his cell.

By taking this drug, used to treat leprosy, Milosevic "annulled the effect of his high blood pressure medication," she continued.

"He could have easily died from that, but that was not his goal - it was only to make his condition worse. Milosevic knew what he was taking, because urine turns blue from this drug and it's clear he must have seen it," Hartmann said.

Milosevic's strategy, she went on, was "to avoid a guilty verdict," and his motive was "not to be remembered in history as somebody who was at the helm of a country and guilty of genocide."

The Croatian magazine is also quoting Milosevic's legal counsel Zdenko Tomanovic as telling Belgrade-based Vecernje Novosti daily that after the news of Milosevic's death, "the Hague launched the information that he had hanged himself."

"When I asked how he managed to return to his bed - where he was found dead - while hanged, they switched to the theory that he took his own life by poisoning himself, and now, he was poisoning himself in order to escape to Russia," Tomanovic said, dismissing the allegations as "cheap, unoriginal, and ineffective fabrications."

Hartmann also claims that former military leader of Serbs in Bosnia Ratko Mladic, whose trial on charges of war crimes and genocide at the Hague Tribunal is ongoing, is now "in the same situation as Milosevic."

"The trial is coming to an end and he is now trying to stall the sentencing. Who's to say that Mladic will survive? Who's to say that after the thing with Milosevic he won't succeed and be allowed to go to Russia for treatment," Harmann has been quoted as saying.

But Mladic's lawyer Miodrag Stojanovic described the comparison as "devious and malicious."

"Our request to grant Mladic treatment in Moscow stands, the tribunal has not yet responded, because the guarantee from Russia has not arrived, either," Stojanovic said.

Hartmann was recently in the news when she was detained by the ICTY, and then released after six days. The warrant was issued after the former spokesperson was in 2011 found guilty on contempt of court charges and sentenced to seven days in prison.

Hartmann was arrested when she showed up in The Hague for the reading of the verdict in the Karadzic trial.