Reports said a lone masked gunman carried out the killing and escaped. However, some witnesses said there had been a group of attackers. Motive unknown Arkan's death is expected to be celebrated in Kosovo where he is alleged to have committed numerous crimes at the time of the Nato bombardment last year. However leaders there said that they too would have liked him to have faced justice. The motive for the killing is unknown.
Correspondents say it is most likely to be politically or gangland related.
Some people said Arkan had been killed because he knew too much about the war crimes committed by Serbian security forces during the Yugoslav conflict. Arkan led the notorious Tigers, who were part of the Serb Volunteer Force operating in Bosnia and Croatia and allegedly in Kosovo. The BBC's south-east Europe analyst, Gabriel Partos, says that crime, government and business have a symbiotic relationship in President Milosevic's Serbia, and it may in the end be difficult to decide whether Arkan's death was a political or a gangland killing. He also had many gangland enemies. He was a powerful figure in the Serbian underworld and was believed to have amassed wealth from war profiteering.