Balkan Warlord ‘Arkan’ Is Killed

Zeljko Raznjatovic, a Serbian paramilitary leader better known as Arkan, who was charged with some of the worst war crimes during Yugoslavia’s vicious breakup, was killed Saturday as he sat in the lobby of a Belgrade hotel.

At least two masked gunmen walked into the Intercontinental Hotel in the Serbian and Yugoslav capital and shot Raznjatovic, the head of a paramilitary unit called the Tigers, around 5:15 p.m., witnesses said.

Raznjatovic, 47, who was shot at least once in the eye, died at a hospital. One of his bodyguards was killed in the hotel lobby; a second bodyguard died on the way to the hospital, according to witnesses.

The man whose name spread terror across the Balkans was married to Serbia’s most popular folk singer. He was accused of murderous rampages in Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, during which some victims, including women and children, were burned alive.

The United Nations’ war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague secretly indicted him in 1997 in connection with atrocities committed during the war in Bosnia, which had ended two years earlier. Last spring, as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombed Yugoslavia to drive Serbian forces from Kosovo--a province of Serbia, the dominant Yugoslav republic--fleeing ethnic Albanian refugees blamed Arkan’s Tigers for numerous murders and rapes.

That prompted Louise Arbour, former chief prosecutor for the U.N. tribunal, to make part of the sealed indictment against Raznjatovic public, along with a warning to others that more indictments would follow. Raznjatovic responded by calling the war crimes prosecutor “a bitch.”

He repeatedly denied the Kosovo Albanians’ allegations, and during NATO’s air war, he was often in Belgrade. He gave interviews to numerous journalists, always insisting that he and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, with whom he was at times closely allied, were not war criminals but patriots.

“We are normal human beings--we are normal people,” he told a U.S. television interviewer during the air war. “I have, myself, nine children. I have a beautiful wife--so we didn’t rape, we didn’t kill, we didn’t torture nobody.”

With a resume as grisly as Raznjatovic’s, speculation about who wanted him dead could lead to many suspects, including any number of rivals in Serbia’s criminal underworld--or even Milosevic himself.

When NATO bombed Belgrade’s Hotel Jugoslavia during its 78-day air war against Yugoslavia, Raznjatovic was widely assumed to be the intended target because he owned a casino in the hotel and was suspected of having his headquarters there.

In June, Belgian authorities reported that he was apparently thinking about turning himself in to the U.N. war crimes tribunal and had approached prosecutors through an intermediary to see if he could strike a deal.

Raznjatovic called the claim ridiculous at the time, but Belgrade is fertile ground for conspiracy theorists, and many will wonder whether Arkan was slain because he knew too much about Milosevic’s alleged involvement in war crimes.

Opposition leader Vuk Draskovic has accused Milosevic’s regime of trying to assassinate him Oct. 3 when a dump truck swerved head-on into a three-car convoy carrying Draskovic, his wife and several top aides and bodyguards.

Four of Draskovic’s entourage died in the fiery crash, including his wife’s brother, a senior official in the Belgrade municipal government. It is run by Draskovic and his Serbian Renewal Party.

A number of politicians, dissidents, journalists and high-profile Belgrade residents have been gunned down in recent years; not one of the killings has been solved.

At least two of the victims were killed near the Intercontinental Hotel. The crimes were all similar and were usually committed by a single gunman armed with a Heckler & Koch submachine gun.

A close friend and business partner of Milosevic’s son, Marko, was shot dead in the hotel complex’s parking lot a few years ago. In a separate incident, a top advisor to Milosevic’s wife, Mirjana Markovic, was killed about 500 yards from the Intercontinental.

After the partial dissolution of the Yugoslav federation, military officers who claimed to have been his commanders said Raznjatovic had been an assassin for its Communist government, which reportedly sent him and other members of a secret police hit squad abroad to kill emigre dissidents, mainly Croats and ethnic Albanians.

He was also wanted by Interpol in connection with a string of bank robberies and prison escapes across Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. He became one of Serbia’s richest men through black market deals and war profiteering.

He had at least half a dozen registered companies, including a bakery and an import-export firm. He also owned a soccer club that was named Obilic after a Serbian hero who killed the sultan leading Turkish troops in the 1389 battle for Kosovo.

Raznjatovic recruited some of his most loyal, and brutal, fighters from among soccer thugs and in prisons, where convicted rapists and murderers were sometimes set free so they could join the ranks of the Tigers.

He spent part of his childhood in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital and the birthplace of his mother, an ethnic Montenegrin. His father, a former Yugoslav army colonel, was also ethnic Montenegrin.

After leading a vicious “ethnic cleansing” campaign in Croatia, Raznjatovic returned to Kosovo in 1992 to campaign for Serbia’s parliament as leader of the ultranationalist Serbian Unity Party.

Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority boycotted the vote to protest Milosevic’s mounting repression in Kosovo, and Raznjatovic won a seat in parliament hands down. He ran for reelection after Milosevic dissolved the parliament in 1993, but he lost, and returned to more familiar exploits.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Saturday that the United States would have preferred that Arkan had been caught and put on trial, and added that his arrest had long been a U.S. goal.

“We take no satisfaction in Arkan’s murder and would have wanted him to stand trial in The Hague for his crimes,” Albright said in a statement released while she was visiting Panama.

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Times staff writer Jonathan Peterson in Panama City contributed to this report.