Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega was taken Friday to the Legal Medicine Institute for the physical and psychiatric exams ordered by the court hearing the case against him for the death of union leader Heliodoro Portugal back in the 1970s.

The defense attorney for Panama’s one-time strongman, Ezra Angel, told EFE briefly this Friday that Noriega’s examinations were ordered by the Second Court of Justice, to which he had appealed last May to permit his client to be held under house arrest.

Angel said last week that the Second Court had ordered the Legal Medicine Institute to determine whether conditions at El Renacer Prison, where Noriega has been held since his return to Panama in December 2011, are good enough to keep him there without harming his health.

The defense maintains that Noriega, 82, should serve at his home the 60-year sentence imposed by the Panamanian justice system for crimes ranging from environmental damage to homicide, due to the delicate state of his health that includes a benign brain tumor which should be operated on.

Surgery to remove the tumor was scheduled for July 21, but “had to be postponed due to the unexpected health problems that he (Noriega) presented at the time,” the ex-general’s personal physician, Eduardo Reyes, told EFE this Friday.

Angel told EFE last Monday that the operation had been suspended, and that undergoing surgery as scheduled would have been “equivalent to the state condemning him to death,” because Noriega had not been given a preoperatory treatment commensurate with the delicate state of his health.

Reyes repeated this Friday that Noriega’s age and clinical profile, which according to an official 2012 report showed him suffering from hypertension, peptic ulcer and hay fever, plus urological and neurological problems derived from a cerebrovascular accident, meant that any surgery practiced on him would entail a “high risk.”

A report by the Legal Medicine Institute revealed late in May that the old ex-dictator was not capable of continuing to stand trial in the Portugal case due to, among other pathologies, his neurological deterioration brought on by the benign brain tumor.

Noriega returned to Panama in December 2011 after serving 21 years behind bars in the United States and France for crimes of drug trafficking and money laundering. EFE

Panama City, Jul 22 (EFE)