Jackie Arklöv

Jackie Banny Arklöv (born 6 June 1973) is a Swedish convicted criminal.

Arklöv told the police that he received corporal punishment, which has been illegal in Sweden since 1979, from his adoptive parents from grade 1 to 8.

Arklöv apparently had an identity crisis as a young boy and tried scrubbing his skin to make it white.

As a child he also tried "colouring" his skin white at school by using flour.

In his teens he developed a strong interest in Nazism and World War II.

He has later said that he became a Nazi, among several reasons, because he "was lonely and full of hate" and "identified with those who were the losers" in the war, as he "felt as one" himself.

Arklöv participated voluntarily in the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s from the age of 19 as a mercenary on the Croatian side.

Arklöv was a convinced neo-Nazi at that time and he wanted to "experience war".

As he read history he studied the fascist Ustasha and became fascinated by their reputation for extreme violence.

At first he travelled from Sweden to join the French Foreign Legion but he heard that they were not participating in any wars, so he continued until he reached Yugoslavia where he joined a Croatian unit "for special purposes" called Ludvig Pavlović.

He kept a war diary which has yet to be released to the public, but in which he wrote down his experiences.

He participated in heavy and violent battles and committed crimes against civilians in villages.

Not much is known about the group but Swedish journalist Magnus Sandelin wrote a book about Arklöv called The Black Nazi (Den Svarte Nazisten) detailing his childhood and his time in the war.

Sandelin is one of few reporters who has been able to study some material from the war diary and wrote that Arklöv had written that he participated in "cleaning up" towns, by throwing grenades into houses and then shooting those inside.

He often listened to extreme metal while in combat zones or on these so-called missions.

He also scribbled pages full of swastikas and wrote a short dictionary containing insults that he could say to his victims.

He once sent a package home to his family during Christmas which contained the cap or hat of a killed soldier.

Arklöv's mother said she felt disgusted when she opened it.

Arklöv once went back home to Sweden for a short break, and has admitted to experienced psychosis-like hallucinations from the war then.

It is documented that he once saw a black dog in his room at home while fully awake, and his family and friends which he slept at has stated that they heard that Arklöv had night terrors, but he still went back to Yugoslavia and to his group and continued his life as a mercenary until the fighting ended.

Arklöv was arrested a short time after the fighting ceased, while walking over the Bosniak border while drunk and was accused of war crimes, including torturing pregnant Bosniak prisoners in concentration camps in Gabela camp, Dretelj camp and Grabovina.

The crimes were severe and he had, among other things, forced a woman to say "Allahu akbar" before shoving his rifle into her mouth, whipped prisoners with a Waffen-SS belt, abused and tortured pregnant girls, as well as having beaten young men and broken their arms and legs.

Prisoners in the camps called Arklöv "the Black Devil" because of his black fascist uniform and skin-colour.

When civilians were forced under torture to humiliate themselves by Arklöv but did not obey him, other guards would step in and tell the victims to "do as he says, or he'll kill you, he is totally insane" and laugh.

Arklöv was seen talking to camp commander Bosko Previsić (known as "Boko") before and after tortures.

Some inmates were forced to hold their fingers apart or stick their tongues out while on the ground in a shed and then get hit with metal objects so hard that the skin between their fingers and their tongues would split.

Arklöv wrote in his diary that joining the Croatian militia was a fulfillment to his "fascist dream" and that killing Muslims was "almost as good as an orgasm".

After the war he was sentenced to thirteen years in prison by a Bosnian court.

The court later changed the sentence to eight years, taking his youth into consideration.

He spent one 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 into custody, but after a while he was acquitted for lack of evidence.

While in custody in Sweden, Arklöv received several letters from another neo-Nazi, Tony Olsson, who was starting a new militant neo-Nazi organization 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 Nationalist Republican Army"), among them Andreas Axelsson and Mats Nilsson.

His private life back in Sweden, after the war experiences, Arklöv described as a surreal nightmarish "twilight state" with feelings that his existence was "falling apart" and that he was living in a "world of ghosts, existing as a mere shadow, full of emptiness".

Arklöv is an ex-neo-Nazi and Yugoslav Wars mercenary and war criminal, who, with two other neo-Nazis, murdered two police officers after a bank robbery in 1999.

Arklöv was born in Liberia; his mother was a Liberian woman and his father was a German national.

He also briefly had a white American stepfather, who later rejected Arklöv's attempts to contact him.

At the age of three he was adopted by a couple from Sweden and grew up in the Lapland village of Ankarsund.

Arklöv was reportedly the only adopted child in the town and he has said that he had a hard time fitting in when growing up, and being both bullied and also bullying others.