Slobodan Milosevic has been found dead in his cell in the Hague where he was on trial for war crimes.
The International War Crimes Tribunal said there was no indication that the former Yugoslav president commited suicide but said it was too early to conclude he had died of natural causes.
The UN has refused a request that an autopsy be carried out in Moscow. The trial of the 64-year-old was repeatedly interrupted by his high blood pressure and heart condition.
He was on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes during the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
He has been blamed for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo.
The atrocities include the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica.
Last week, former rebel Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic committed suicide at the tribunal's detention centre. Mr Babic had testified against Milosevic and was in The Hague to appear in the trial of another Croatian Serb.
The rise and fall of Slobodan Milosevic
Slobodan Milosevic was born on 20 August, 1941, in the eastern Serbian town of Pozarevac. He was born to an Orthodox priest and ardently communist schoolteacher. Both parents ended up committing suicide ten years apart.
Milosevic graduated from Belgrade University with a law degree and climbed through the ruling ranks of Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia, where he honed his political skills.
He headed both the state-run gas company and the state-run bank. But he was still a relatively little-known official until 24 April 1987, when he was sent by then president Ivan Stambolic to Serbia’s troubled Kosovo region.
He prestige in Serbia rose over his part in quelling protests over the alleged persecution of Serbs by majority Albanians in the region.
Milosevic took over as president of the Serbian republic in 1989, quickly revoking Kosovo's autonomous status and ratcheting up the Serbs' jingoistic spirit as Yugoslavia broke apart in 1991.
As president of Serbia and later head of the rump Yugoslav Republic that joined it with Montenegro, Milosevic was a cunning leader who used the state media to the hilt to inflame Serb passions and stifle dissent.
He ruled with an iron fist, aided by his wife Mira, his childhood sweetheart whose intellect and fierce drive earned her the sobriquet ‘Lady Macbeth of the Balkans’.
But after the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, the ethnic cleansing campaign in Kosovo and the 11 weeks of NATO airstrikes it prompted were the last straw for a beleaguered Yugoslav people.
Increasingly targeted by demonstrations and strikes, Milosevic ran for a new term as Yugoslav president but the machinery no longer worked for him. He conceded defeat to Vojislav Kostunica and resigned on October 7, 2000.
Six months later he was arrested at his home in Belgrade on suspicion of abuse of power and misappropriation of state funds, surrendering only after holding a gun to his head and threatening to kill himself.
His transfer to the United Nations war crimes court in The Hague on 28 June, hardly produced a ripple in Belgrade.
His trial, which began on 12 February, was frequently interrupted because of illness sparked by high blood pressure and heart problems.
Insisting on defending himself at the UN tribunal, Milosevic concentrated almost totally on events in Kosovo, hardly going into the charges related to the war in Croatia and the genocide charges against him over the war in Bosnia.
According to the last calculations, done on February 15, Milosevic had already used up 85.11% of the 360 hours allotted to him for his defence, meaning he only had about a dozen court days left to complete his defence case.
