Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega could suffer stroke. FILE

• This conscious and well-focused, could suffer transient vascular disease

Specialists opted to leave him in intensive care and also to monitor their blood pressure

Panama, Panama (FEB/06/2012)-former Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega is “stable”, but continue to boarding school at a public hospital in the Panamanian capital for at least 48 hours, said Monday the Minister of health, Franklin Vergara.

Noriega, who in a week will meet at the age of 78, “is conscious and well oriented”, “he is stable, after having been carried Sunday Hospital Santo Tomás, said the Minister in a statement.

However, the former strong man of Panama “might” be suffering from “a vascular disease transient”, which is why “chose to leave it in intensive care” and also monitor their blood pressure, said Vergara.

Noriega was transferred to the hospital from his jail cell in central prison the rebirth, on the banks of the Panama Canal, after suffering a blackout, with “a pattern of hypertension with the possibility of a stroke”, according to a police statement.

“Is being evaluated at the hospital at the request of the leaders of the prison where he is detained and you are getting all the attentions of the case”, told AFP the Prime Minister, responsible for prisons in the country, Jorge Fábrega.

According to Vergara, Noriega took axial CT scan “which came out normal”, and he took an angioresonancia, “which was also normal”.

After the 48 hours that should stay in the hospital, where it will be also examined by a neurologist and is practiced to other evidence, “determine its evolution and will coordinate their return to prison.”

“Has to comply with the legal procedures existing just as any other citizen,” said Fábrega, who ruled out, for now, any kind of measure of grace to the general by his losses of health.

Noriega, who de facto ruled Panama between 1983 and 1989, returned on 11 December the country extradited from Paris, after serving 21 years in prison in United States and France for drug trafficking and money-laundering.

The former dictator, overthrown on December 20, 1989 by United States troops who invaded Panama, meets in El Renacer, 25 km to the Northwest of the capital, on the banks of the Canal, three sentences of 20 years each by the disappearance of opponents.

Victims of his regime are afraid that you benefit from a law that allows that over 70 prisoners met their sentences at home; but according to Fabrega that “depends on the diagnosis of doctors and procedures” legal.

Noriega, who was also a CIA agent, has a summons to appear at next March before a judge who is processing for the killing of an American in 1969, the first process facing since he returned to the country.

Fabrega also rejected versions of opposition to Noriega that detention in hospital has been given to divert public attention to the repression of the police on an indigenous protest, which left a native dead and dozens of wounded and detainees.

“Maybe in a fantastic mind can imagine things like that of conspiracies.” “It is pure speculation,” said Fabrega.

Reports of officers, published on his return to the country, Noriega was suffering from high blood pressure, problems of mobility, vascular brain accident and other ills.