The pin-up star for Serbia's ultra-nationalist movement, and diva of Serbian turbo-folk music, Svetlana Raznatovic, known by her stage moniker Ceca, has been charged with embezzling funds from a football club and illegal possession of weapons.

Ceca is most famous for being the widow of Zeljko Razatovic, better known by his nom-de-guerre Arkan, whose paramilitary unit Arkan's Tigers cut a bloody swath of killing across Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during the wars of 1991-95. Arkan later became a major figure in the Belgrade criminal underworld, and a bridge between the crime syndicates and then president Slobodan Milosevic and nationalist political circles, at whose disposal he worked. He was shot dead in 2000.

The charges against his widow relate to FK Obilic, the football team of which Arkan was president and took from obscurity to the Champions League qualifiers in 1998-99.

Arkan took over the club, one of Serbia's oldest dating back to 1924, in 1996 and, according to histories of Serbian football, used his criminal connections to threaten opposing players. Games were hallmarked by crowds of veterans and killers from his former units menacing rival teams with guns and chants. Obilic won the Serbian league in 1998, and were knocked out of the European competition by Bayern Munich.

Ceca took over the club herself briefly in 1998, and again after her husband's murder, but seemed unsuited to sports management as the team fell back down the leagues and to amateur status.

Serbian state prosecutors accuse Ceca of taking for personal use an illegal share in the sale of 15 of the players which made up the star team, including the high-profile Nikola Lazetic, who played for Fenerbahçe of Istanbul and Torino in Italy's Serie A.

Serbian media sources say that the amounts allegedly embezzled add up to $3.48m, and suggest that Ceca had avoided arrest over the years because of her connections in high politics and her huge popularity.

Dissident Serbian media trying to investigate the triumvirate of football, the criminal underworld and corruption in politics found themselves so violently intimidated that some journalists from the radio station B92 were granted round-the-clock police protection.

Ceca is also charged with illegal possession of 11 machine guns found at her home after the assassination of the reformist Serbian prime minister Zoran Djindjic – a sworn enemy of the ultra-nationalist hardliners — in 2003.

The singer has said in her defence that all the football transfers involved in the investigation were deals done by her late husband, and the guns also belonged to him.

Ceca started life as a singer of traditional Serbian folk music, but during the years after the carnage unleashed by Serbia's client statelet in Bosnia, she became the icon of "turbo-folk", a belligerent genre combining folk chromatics and grinding techno beat.

In one of her rare interviews with western media, she told the BBC: "Do I look like someone who, being a young woman, being fragile, can be with someone who is a criminal and murderer? I think I don't look like that."

She called Arkan "extremely brave, a caring husband and father, and next to him you could not have felt anything other than a real woman".

• This article was amended on 5 April 2011. The original described "turbo-folk" as a belligerent genre combining folk chromatics, grinding techno beat and fervent nationalist lyrics. This last phrase has been removed, since "turbo-folk" lyrics only rarely contain specific nationalist texts or references.