March 18, 2003	Tuesday	Muharram 14, 1424

BELGRADE, March 17: Serbian police hunting for the killers of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic on Monday raided the home of feared warlord Arkan’s young widow and local radio said she was detained because of close links with key suspects.

B92 radio, quoting sources close to the investigation, said the inquiry had shown folk music star Svetlana “Ceca” Raznatovic was in contact with two alleged gangster bosses blamed for the killing both before and after the assassination.

B92 said one was Milorad Lukovic, or Legija, who once was a member of Arkan’s paramilitary unit, which fought in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Legija became a special police commander in the mid-1990s but left the force in 2001.

Police, who have arrested hundreds of people since a sniper shot Djindjic dead in central Belgrade on Wednesday, were not immediately available for comment on the report.

If confirmed, it would come as a shock for many fans of Ceca, who drew more than 70,000 people to a concert last June devoted to her late husband in a Belgrade soccer stadium.

Arkan, whose real name was Zeljko Raznatovic, died in a hail of bullets in a Belgrade hotel in 2000.

A Reuters reporter said four police vans sealed off Arkan’s luxury house while heavily armed policemen in military-style fatigues and balaclavas guarded the entrance.

Arkan’s “Tigers” were the most feared of Serb paramilitary groups accused of ethnic cleansing. The UN war crimes court in The Hague indicted him in 1999 for alleged atrocities during the wars in Bosnia and Croatia in 1991-95.

A senior official of Djindjic’s Democratic Party, Cedomir Jovanovic, told B92 radio that police searching for the crime leaders the government says ordered the assassination have detained around 400 people so far.

Djindjic was a leading reformer who helped topple ex-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 and later enraged nationalists by shipping him to the UN war crimes tribunal. He was under Western pressure to arrest and deliver other Serb war crimes suspects.

He had also vowed to clamp down on organised crime, allegedly linked to Milosevic’s feared secret service.—Reuters