THE HAGUE, Netherlands – A heart attack killed Slobodan Milosevic in his jail cell, according to preliminary findings from Dutch pathologists who conducted a nearly eight hour autopsy on the former Yugoslav leader yesterday, an official at the U.N. war crimes tribunal said.

The official, who agreed to discuss the autopsy only on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information, commented after a day of speculation on the cause of death that swirled from ill health to suicide to poison.

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 causing wars that killed 250,000 people during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. And a legal adviser said the 64-year-old Milosevic feared he was being poisoned.

In Serbia, Milosevic loyalists burned candles in memory of their fallen hero at branches of his Socialist Party.

Secretary of State Rice called Milosevic “one of the most malign forces in Europe in quite a long time.”

The president of the U.N. tribunal, Fausto Pocar, said he ordered the autopsy after a Dutch coroner failed Saturday to establish the cause of death. A pathologist sent by Serbia observed the procedure at the Netherlands Forensic Institute, an agency of the Dutch Justice Ministry.

Outside the tribunal’s offices, Milosevic’s legal adviser showed reporters a six-page letter he said the former leader wrote the day before his death claiming traces of a powerful drug used to treat leprosy or tuberculosis had been found in his bloodstream.

Zdenko Tomanovic said Milosevic was seriously concerned. “They would like to poison me,” Milosevic told him.