Ex-dictator Noriega critical after brain surgeries
PANAMA CITY (AP): FORMER PANAMANIAN dictator Manuel Noriega was in critical condition and sedated in a hospital’s intensive care unit yesterday after undergoing two brain surgeries.
Noriega, 83, underwent the first procedure Tuesday morning to remove a benign tumour from his brain. But after that surgery, doctors discovered a haemorrhage that forced them to go back in that afternoon, his daughters and lawyer said.
Noriega’s attorney, Ezra Angel, said doctors succeeded in stopping the bleeding during the second procedure, and Noriega was returned to intensive care.
“His condition has not improved, nor has it worsened,” Angel said yesterday.
Officials at the Santo Tomas public hospital in Panama City did not comment or return calls.
TUMOUR GREW UNEXPECTEDLY
The tumour was detected in the months after Noriega returned to Panama in December 2011 and was imprisoned for corruption and the killings of political opponents during his reign in the 1980s.
Doctors have said it grew unexpectedly recently and
threatened the life of the former dictator, who has also suffered from vascular ailments and uses a wheelchair.
Noriega was transferred from prison to house arrest on January 29 to prepare for the procedure, which was originally scheduled for mid-February.
The former general ruled
Panama with an iron fist from 1983 to 1989. He was ousted by a US invasion in 1989 and jailed for years in the United States on drug charges.
He was then imprisoned in France for money laundering, before being returned in 2011 to Panama, where he had already been convicted in absentia.