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Shot three times in a hail of submachine-gun fire while drinking with friends and bodyguards in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, Arkan died Saturday in a Belgrade emergency room. A bodyguard, Dragan Garic, and a business associate, Milenko Mandic, aka Manda, were also killed in the shooting.

Arkan's murder is the latest in a series of more than a dozen gangster-style killings in Belgrade that have targeted figures who, like Arkan, had plenty of blood on their hands, profited from war and were in the employ of the Milosevic regime. It's the type of crime most people in this city have gotten used to remaining unsolved but speak of in whispers as having been ordered by "forces very high up."

"The police killed him, so why would they arrest anybody?" said a taxi driver who drove past the blocked-off area of New Belgrade a few hours after the killing.

"I lean to the conclusion that the regime is behind the assassination," speculated one Serbian analyst. "Not because I would know about any recent developments regarding Arkan's conflicts with the regime, but because of the circumstances of the assassination: Just how the hell did they manage to kill him and escape, in a hotel full of the security staff?"

"Someone in the regime knew about what was going to happen," suggested one Western analyst who asked not to be named. "It was someone who was watching Arkan a long, long time, someone who knew his patterns very well and presumably someone who could have known when his guard would be down. But there is no question that this killing is a bonus to the regime. One less key eyewitness for The Hague."

The United Nations war crimes tribunal secretly indicted Arkan for crimes against humanity in 1997, and after his indictment was made public during the NATO intervention last spring, Arkan was rumored to have contacted authorities in Belgium -- where his daughter lives -- about the possibility of seeking asylum there. Authorities reportedly told Arkan he would be extradited to The Hague. In addition, there are rumors that Arkan had been negotiating a possible immunity deal (in exchange for testimony against Milosevic) with The Hague through his Italian lawyer and business associate Giovanni DiStefano, though DiStefano has denied that Arkan was preparing to surrender.

One thing is sure: with Arkan's death, another key link tying Milosevic to war crimes in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo -- for which the Yugoslav leader was indicted by the U.N. tribunal last May -- has disappeared.

It's now clear that the most dangerous thing to be in Serbia these days is a former friend of the regime. The list of former Milosevic associates who have been assassinated and whose murders remain mysteriously unsolved is growing. Former Serbian Interior Minister Radovan Stojcic, known as "Badza" ("the hulk"), was similarly assassinated in a Belgrade pizzeria in 1997. Zoran "the Rifle Butt" Todorovic -- general-secretary of Milosevic's wife's political party, JUL -- was assassinated as he arrived at work in 1997. A former friend of Milosevic's son Marko, Vlada "the Club" Kovacevic, was killed outside the Sava business center, just down the street from the Intercontinental, where Arkan was killed.

The Milosevic regime is not making much effort to act surprised about Arkan's killing. While Belgrade's newspapers ran massive front page stories on Arkan's assassination -- all of them were sold out on Sunday -- the regime-controlled Politika only mentioned it on Page 20, and the regime-controlled television didn't broadcast anything about it until hours after Arkan's assassination was broadcast worldwide on CNN, the BBC and independent Serbian television. Similarly, though all of the major political opposition parties issued statements about Arkan's murder, neither Milosevic's Socialist Party, nor his wife's JUL have issued official statements.

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