Wikipedia article on the killer. Interesting how easy the Bosnian Muslim courts were on him even though he brutally tortured their people in concentration camps. And notice how all the neo-Nazis went to fight for the Croats (and sometimes the Muslims) but not the Serbs which the media was always comparing to the Nazis.
Jackie Arklöv
Jackie Arklöv (born June 6, 1973) is a Swedish major criminal and police killer.
Arklöv was born in Liberia, his biological mother was black and his father was white. At the age of 3 he was adopted by a couple from a small village in northern Sweden, and in his teens he ironically developed a strong interest in nazism and World War II. Later on he joined a nazi organisation and became an active supporter.
Arklöv participated voluntarily in the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, as a mercenary on the Croatian side when he was only 19 years old. He has been accused of war crimes, including torturing Bosniak prisoners in camps in Gabela and Grabovina. After the war he was sentenced to 13 years in prison by a Bosnian court. They later changed the sentence to 8 years, taking Arklöv's young age into consideration. He spent 1 year in a Bosnian prison, but returned to Sweden after an exchange of prisoners organized by the Swedish Red Cross. In Sweden he was taken to custudy, but after a while he was acquitted for lack of evidence. However, in march 2004, the Dagens Nyheter journalist Maciej Zaremba published an article where he strongly critisized the closure of the case, and he also managed to find several witnesses to the war crimes. Later that year the prosecuter decided to re-open the investigation, and in june 2006 it was clear that Arklöv will be prosecuted. When this is written (july 2006), it is not decided when.
While in custody Arklöv received several letters from another nazi, Tony Olsson, who was starting a new nazi organisation and, impressed by Arklöv's war experience, wanted him to join. Arklöv wrote back, and the two became friends. After being released, Arklöv and Olsson met with the other members of the newly started NRA (Nationalistiska Republikanska Armén, the Nationalistic Republican Army), among them Andreas Axelsson and Mats Nilsson. This resulted in a robbery tour in the Swedish province Östergötland in 1999, which ended on May 28 in the small town of Kisa where Arklöv, Olsson and Axelsson robbed a bank. They got away with over 2 million Swedish krona, but during their excape, they came across two policemen who were setting up road blocks just outside the small community of Malexander. There was a shootout between the robbers and the policemen, and finally the policemen were literally executed with their own weapons. Arklöv and Olsson fled, but Axelsson had been hit by a bullet and was taken to the hospital by a car flagged down by Arklöv. On May 31 Arklöv was shot down by the police in Tyresö outside Stockholm and again arrested and put to custody.
During the trial, Arklöv claimed to be completely innocent. He said he had been in Stockholm the entire time and did not take part in any of the robberys or the murders. This time, however, the evidences against him were strong. The police had found his fingerprints on a gun, his DNA on a mask and in the car. After that he confessed to the robbery in Kisa, but still denied to have killed the policemen. All three of them did, and it could never be proved who was the killer. The court then found them all guilty of murder, since it was clear that they had all been shooting at the two policemen, and they were sentenced to life imprisonment. The sentence was appealed to the Court of Appeal, and Arklöv kept denying he had anyting to do with the murders. The Court of Appeal gave the same sentence; life imprisonment for all three.
In 2001 Arklöv suddenly decided to confess. He was indeed the one who fired the final, lethal shots at the policemen. Olsson and Axelsson moved a petition for a new trial to the Supreme Court, but they regarded the life sentence as written in such a way that Arklöv's confession wouldn't change anything. The petition was rejected. At the same time Arklöv said he had abandoned his nazi beliefs and had contacted the Exit group for help.
Today Arklöv is serving his life sentence at the Kumla High Security Prison.
On the lighter side, Arklöv is a talanted artist, and had 7 paintings put out on an exhibition for prison art at Långholmen in Stockholm.
I was trying to look up info on the use of mercenaries in Croatia re your article -- thinking in terms of the rag-tag criminal like your guy -- but I ran across important info, not only on MPRI, but also on how MPRI actually operates. Thought I should share it.
This was an interview with a Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan, director of the Center for Defense Information. The entire interview is here http://www.cdi.org/adm/1113/transcript.html but the part re Croatia & Bosnia is below:
...."NARRATOR: If EO represents the "boots on the ground" end of the mercenary spectrum, the other end is represented by a firm called MPRI. MPRI stands for Military Professionals Resources Inc. Headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, it claims to be "the greatest corporate assemblage of military expertise in the world." Founded in 1987 by eight former United States senior military officers, MPRI says it only operates in areas approved by the US State Department.
MPRI has very close ties to the US Government. Several former high-ranking US military officers are employees of MPRI.
LTGEN ED SOYSTER: MPRI was formed by our president and CEO in 1987 with a recognition that there is a great national resource in the retired military community. And if that talent could be brought together, we could provide various military expertise in a variety of ways to our government.
NARRATOR: Ed Soyster is a retired US Army lieutenant general and a vice president for International Operations at MPRI.
LTGEN SOYSTER: The difficulty with the term "mercenary" is that no one can define. The United Nations has not successfully done it. Other commissions, protocols have not; they've taken different approaches. So, it's a difficult term to define. And I've looked at all those definitions as they've tried to do that and we don't meet any of those criteria.
NARRATOR: He also emphasizes that MPRI is not a fighting force.
LTGEN SOYSTER: No one at MPRI has ever carried a gun, nor will we ever carry a gun. There's every reason for that that you can think of. It would not be a very good business practice. I don't know how you'd manage liability and all those things associated with it. It would be in such contrast to the principles of this company.
NARRATOR: MPRI is best known for its work in recent years in training military forces in Croatia and Bosnia. In March 1994, the Pentagon referred the Croatian defense minister to MPRI. Since then, about 15 MPRI employees have been training the Croatian army so that it can provide national security and meet defense needs as Croatia makes the transition into a democratic society.
In May 1996, MPRI landed its highest profile assignment to date. The firm was granted a contract to train the military forces of Bosnia. Currently, 185 MPRI personnel participate in the US-supervised "Train and Equip" program. The program's objective is to integrate and build up the Bosnian army of Muslims and Croats against the Serbs.
The Train and Equip program hopes to establish the military balance required for an enduring peace in Bosnia. MPRI runs a school and battlefield simulation center and is helping construct a large military firing range.
LTGEN SOYSTER: We're teaching a total military program. We've established a school to provide individual training for officers and noncommissioned officers. We've established a simulation center to train battalion and brigade staffs and also for leader development. We're developing a combat training center, where they'll have ranges and so forth and manuever room. We conduct unit training for the individual units, so they can bring all this together, and we teach the new equipment training.
NARRATOR: Proponents of the Train and Equip program believe that the sooner Bosnian forces are capable of defending themselves, the sooner international troops can be removed from the region. However, the goal of strengthening Muslim-Croat units in Bosnia to offset the Bosnian Serb forces may have dangerous consequences in a region racked by ethnic tension and civil war.
Military experts assert that an increase of arms and funds to Bosnian forces may lead to renewed violence. Although MPRI is limited to training the Bosnian army in defense tactics, soldiers say there is little distinction between defensive and offensive strategies. But GEN Soyster thinks that such a view is overstated.
LTGEN SOYSTER: Well, it would be hard to say that if you can use a tank defensively that you couldn't use it offensively. I would tell you though, at least in the training of the US Army, an entirely different set of skills are taught for offensive operations, an entirely different organization is provided to the US Army. And so, the military analyst who thinks that that's an easy leap, he's never gone from the defense on to the offense.
NARRATOR: GEN Soyster also disagrees with those who say that MPRI was used to train the Bosnian military, as a part of the Train and Equip program, in order to sidestep a public debate in the United States over foreign policy.
LTGEN SOYSTER: The reality is that to provide the kind of training and expertise that we can provide versus the government is -- for instance, we have 200 people in Bosnia. They are senior officers and senior noncommissioned officers. If you took the same expertise from the active divisions, you would considerably degrade their readiness to provide the same level of experience.
NARRATOR: It is true that regardless of who provides it, nobody can be sure what the ultimate effect of providing military training will be.
MR. ISENBERG: It is possible that the skills they teach a foreign client could someday be used in a sort of boomerang effect, in terms of whoever they teach or whoever they train and advise will have their military skills improved. They will become more deadly on the battlefield. Just like a weapons system, you can't say in the long run who those skills will be turned against.".....