[JURIST] The president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia [official website] has directed the court's Trial Chamber to consider varying or lifting protective measures applied to certain materials in the case against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in order to assist Dutch authorities and the Tribunal's own team investigating the circumstances of Milosevic's death. Tribunal President Judge Fausto Pocar said in his order [PDF] disclosed Wednesday that it was in the interests of the Tribunal and the public that investigators have at their disposal all of the relevant documents required for a thorough investigation into Slobodan Milosevic’s death.

In other late developments in the Milosevic matter, Russia's lower house of parliament, the Duma [official website] passed a resolution Wednesday calling for an independent international investigation into the circumstances of Milosevic's death and urging the ICTY's shutdown, saying its proceedings testified to a "a high degree of politicization and bias", and that the court was "useless." The Duma was an outspoken supporter of Milosevic during the NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in the 1999 Kosovo conflict. Also Wednesday, Russian doctors who flew to The Hague to earlier this week to review the initial autopsy results on Milosevic [JURIST report] said they agreed that the cause of the death was a heart attack. AFP has more; RFE/RL has additional coverage of the Duma resolution.

Milosevic's body was flown back to Serbia on Wednesday, with burial now expected in his hometown of Pozarevac [Radio Netherlands report] on Saturday.