According to Helder Pitta Gros, Angola’s attorney general, poisoning was not a factor in the former president José Eduardo dos Santos death.
After receiving a request from his daughter, Tchize dos Santos, who claimed her father had been murdered, a judge in Barcelona authorised the postmortem.
She has mentioned a plot to have her father killed in order to stop him from backing the opposition in the approaching elections in Angola.
Dos Santos passed away on Friday while receiving medical care in a hospital in Barcelona.
The family’s attorneys have criticised efforts by the Angolan government to bring the body back for a formal funeral, claiming that the deceased preferred a private burial in Spain.
Since stepping down in 2017, he had mostly lived in Barcelona. He had been undergoing treatment for various health challenges.
Angola’s current President Joao Lourenco, announced five days of national mourning starting Friday, when the country’s flag will fly at half-mast and public events are cancelled.
Dos Santos came to power four years after Angola gained independence from Portugal and became engrossed in the Cold War as a battlefield.
His political journey spanned single-party Marxist rule in post-colonial years and a democratic system of government adopted in 2008. He voluntarily stepped down when his health began failing.
He held full control on the 17th-century presidential palace in Luanda, the southern African country’s Atlantic capital, by distributing Angola’s wealth between his army generals and political rivals to ensure their loyalty. He demoted anyone he perceived to be gaining a level of popularity that could upset his control.
