The UN war crimes tribunal hopes an autopsy on Slobodan Milosevic today clear up the cause of his death in his cell only months before a verdict was due in his four-year-old trial.
Milosevic was found dead yesterday prompting relatives of war victims and Balkan politicians to say they had been robbed of justice.
The tribunal said there was no indication the 64-year-old former Yugoslav president - who suffered from a heart condition and high blood pressure - committed suicide.
Milosevic's lawyer Zdenko Tomanovic told reporters his client had feared he was being poisoned but the tribunal rejected a request for the autopsy to take place in Russia.
Serbia and Montenegro's Minister for Human Rights and Ethnic Minorities, Rasim Ljajic, was due to travel to The Hague today with two pathologists for the autopsy, officials said.
A tribunal official said she could not say what time the autopsy would begin or whether the officials from Serbia had arrived.
There was no word on when Milosevic's body might be returned to Serbia for burial and no reliable information on when and where the funeral will take place.
There was little sign of grief in Serbia, which today marked the third anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, the man who ousted Milosevic.
But the country's opposition Radical Party, the strongest in grassroots support, and Milosevic's rump Socialist Party said the former president should get a national hero's funeral.
Analysts said his death could make the centrist government hesitate over delivering top fugitive General Ratko Mladic to The Hague. The European Union has threatened to suspend association talks if he is not arrested in the next four weeks.
The tribunal also faces questions over monitoring of inmates because Milosevic's death was the second within a week after the suicide of former rebel Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic. Normal detention centre procedures mean inmates are checked every 30 minutes during the night.