Željko Ražnatović (Serbian cyrillic: Æåšêî Ðàæíàòîâèž), widely known as Arkan (Àðêàí), (April 17, 1952 - January 15, 2000), was a Serbian career criminal and paramilitary leader. One of Interpol`s most wanted criminals in the 1970s and 1980s, he gained further notoriety by organizing and leading a paramilitary force in the Yugoslav Wars. He was indicted by the UN for crimes against humanity including his role as leader in acts of genocide. Arkan was assasinated in 2000 before he could be tried for these crimes. He is still revered as a folk hero by some Serbs.
Arkan was born in Brežice, a small bordertown in the Styrian region of southern Slovenia where his father was stationed at the time, but also spent a part of his childhood in Zagreb and Pančevo before his father`s job eventually took the family to Belgrade, which Arkan considered his hometown. His disciplinarian father Veljko Ražnatović was a Montenegrin Serb who served as a decorated officer in the SFR Yugoslav Air Force, earning high rank for his notable World War II involvement on the Partisan side, while Arkan`s mother Slavka Josifović also took part in the war as a communist activist.

Arkan grew up with three older sisters in a strict, militaristic household with beatings administered by his father being a regular occurrence. In a 1991 interview for Duga magazine, Arkan recalled: "He didn`t really hit me in a classical sense, he`d basically grab me and slam me against the floor".Due to the highly demanding and significant position of both his parents, there appeared to be very little time in which a bond was able to be established between parents and children. His parents eventually divorced during his teenage years.

It wasn`t long before Arkan began acting out. He was only nine when he ran away from home for the first time, spending a month and a half in Dubrovnik`s international camp. He also often ran away to stay with his more welcoming relatives, and simultaneously also got involved in various kinds of mischief, eventually ending up in a delinquents` institution. He became a petty criminal (purse snatching, kiosk break-ins, etc.) in his early teenage years, before graduating to more serious offenses as an adult.

In 1972, at the age of 20, he illegally emigrated to Western Europe, hoping to find fortune through a criminal career. Abroad, he met many well-known criminals from Yugoslavia who were later killed. He took his nickname, "Arkan", after one of the false names of his multiple passports. As an armed robber, assailant and murderer he had convictions or warrants in Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Italy.

He was imprisoned in Belgium in 1974, escaped in 1977, rearrested in the Netherlands in 1979 but escaped again in 1981. At one point, he was wounded in a clash with police. He fled from dozens of European prisons, including the compound which is today a high security prison for war criminals in the Scheveningen suburb of the Hague. Ražnatović was even on Interpol`s ten most wanted list.

In his youth, Arkan was a ward of the Slovenian politician Stane Dolanc, his father`s friend. Dolanc was chief of the secret police and a close associate of the Yugoslav strongman Josip Broz Tito. Whenever Arkan was in trouble Dolanc helped him as a reward for his services to the Yugoslav secret state police (UDBA). Arkan worked as an undercover agent from 1973, w