BELGRADE -- When Zeljko ("Arkan") Raznatovic was shot down earlier this month, he joined a long list of the famous and infamous assassinated in Serbia.
The murder fits the well-established pattern of public killings of important personalities in Serbia over the past five years. While most of the victims have had criminal dossiers, the list includes the nouveau riches, politicians, policemen and journalists. None of the perpetrators have been apprehended.
Among the most notable examples were Slavko Curuvija, a journalist and owner of the Dnevni Telegraf newspaper, Radovan Stojicic, former head of the police and Zoran Todorovic, a senior official of the Yugoslav United Left political party.
Arkan was equally at home in the worlds of the criminal underground and the political elite, but belonged to neither. Members of both worlds had reasons to wish him dead.
Many here had predicted Arkan's assassination after the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague announced the indictments against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and four other top government officials. "I know a lot, I saw a lot, and I took part in a lot of that," Arkan said at the time.
Arkan himself had long been a target of international investigators. In the fall of 1996, the UN announced that it was investigating Arkan's participation in war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia.
Last March, the Tribunal revealed that it had issued a secret indictment against him in 1997. The contents of that indictment still remain sealed.
One source with connections to the criminal underground in Serbia claimed that Arkan's lawyers had approached the Tribunal, seeking immunity for their client should he agree to testify against Milosevic and the others.
Tribunal spokesman Paul Risely said he could not comment on such allegations but added that Arkan's death should be warning to those who have been indicted but are still at large that "the safest place for them is within the United Nations detention facility here. If Arkan had turned himself in, he would be alive today."
Still, the question remains whether Arkan was killed because of some crime-related squabble or because he was a witness who knew too much. Many in Serbia believe that if the killing were motivated by criminal disputes, it would have happened long ago.
Goran Svilanovic, leader of the Civic Alliance of Serbia, believes Arkan's death indicates "the denouement among the strongmen in Serbia has begun." Zoran Djindjic, leader of the Democratic Party, said that the killing confirms that "the regime is unable to preserve security in Serbia." A statement from the Serbian Renewal Movement, whose leader Vuk Draskovic was the victim of an assassination attempt, stated that Arkan's murder is "confirmation of the existence of state crime in Serbia."
Radmilo Bogdanovic, Serbia's former chief of police and a senior official in the ruling Serbian Socialist Party, dismisses the accusations of "state terrorism." He said that "only a serious police and judicial investigation" would discover who committed the crime.
The Belgrade daily Politika -- a newspaper with close ties to Milosevic -- reported that one of the alleged assailants, wounded in the attack and currently under protection in a hospital, will certainly provide information to help solve the case.
But with more than 500 murder cases still unsolved in Serbia, it's more likely that an official investigation will fail to resolve the mystery surrounding the death of Arkan.
Srdjan Staletovic is a Belgrade-based correspondent for
the Institute for War & Peace
Reporting, a London-based independent media organization.