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SARAJEVO: Bosnian authorities have issued an arrest warrant for ethnic Serb leader Milorad Dodik, a senior police officer said Wednesday, as part of an investigation into his alleged flouting of the country’s constitution.
The announcement comes a week after police said they were seeking to question Dodik, who remained defiant and called on federal police to ignore the order.
But according to the head of police in Bosnia’s Muslim-Croat statelet, an arrest warrant has now been issued by authorities.
It also includes orders to detain Republika Srpska Prime Minister Radovan Viskovic and Parliamentary Speaker Nenad Stevandic.
“We received an arrest warrant for these three individuals,” said Vahidin Munjic during an interview with local media.
“All police organs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, if they spot these individuals, are obligated to arrest them and hand them over to the state court.”
Tensions have soared in the divided Balkan country since Dodik was convicted last month for defying Christian Schmidt, the international envoy charged with overseeing the peace accords that ended Bosnia’s 1990s war.
Dodik, who is the president of Bosnia’s Republika Srpska (RS) statelet, remains unrepentant. He helped push through laws forbidding the federal police and judiciary from entering Bosnia’s Serb entity in retaliation.
The laws were later struck down by the constitutional court.
Since the end of Bosnia’s inter-ethnic war in the 1990s, the country has consisted of two autonomous halves — the Serb-dominated RS and a Muslim-Croat region.
The two entities have their own governments and parliaments and are linked by weak central institutions.
During a meeting in the RS capital on Wednesday, Dodik appeared to pay little attention to the latest news concerning the warrant.
“We will continue to implement the policies adopted by the parliament,” he said, referring to the RS’s legislator.
Bosnia’s divided politics and fragile, post-war institutions have faced increasing uncertainty due to the unfolding political crisis.
On Tuesday, the head of Bosnia’s federal police force Darko Culum — an ally of Dodik — announced that he was resigning from the post and would return to work for the interior ministry in the RS.
Days earlier, Dodik had called on ethnic Serbs working for Bosnia’s national institutions to quit and take up jobs in the RS.
Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic — a major backer of Dodik — also said he planned to raise the issue of the arrest warrant during a visit to Brussels this week.
“We could end up in a total disaster overnight. That’s why we must do everything to preserve peace and stability,” Vucic said during an interview with a Serbian broadcaster.
For years, Dodik has pursued a separatist agenda, repeatedly threatening to pull the Serb statelet out of Bosnia’s central institutions — including its army, judiciary and tax system — which has led to sanctions from the United States.
The RS leader had already pushed through two earlier laws that refused to recognize decisions made by Schmidt and Bosnia’s constitutional court.
That led to his conviction last month, when he was sentenced to a year in prison and handed a six-year ban from office.

NEW YORK: A US judge on Wednesday denied a bid by President Donald Trump’s administration to dismiss detained Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil’s challenge to the legality of his arrest by immigration agents over his participation in pro-Palestinian protests but moved the case to New Jersey.
Manhattan-based US District Judge Jesse Furman agreed with the Justice Department that he did not have jurisdiction over the case.
Furman ordered the case moved to federal court in the state of New Jersey, where Khalil was held at the time his lawyers first challenged his arrest in New York. Furman did not rule on Khalil’s bid to be released on bail from detention.
Neither Khalil’s lawyers nor the Justice Department immediately responded to requests for comment.
Khalil, 30, was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on March 8 outside his university residence in Manhattan. His lawyers have said he was targeted in retaliation for his role advocating for Palestinian rights, meaning the arrest violated free speech protections under the US Constitution’s First Amendment.
The case has become a flashpoint for the Republican president’s pledge to deport some non-US citizens who took part in the protests against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza that swept American college campuses including Columbia after the October 2023 attack against Israelis by Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Trump’s administration has said these protests included support for Hamas and antisemitic harassment of Jewish students. Student protest organizers have said criticism of Israel is being wrongly conflated with antisemitism.
Khalil, who is of Palestinian descent, entered the United States on a student visa in 2022, married his American citizen wife in 2023, and secured lawful permanent residency — known as a green card — last year. Khalil became one of the most visible leaders of Columbia’s pro-Palestinian protest movement while completing coursework for a master’s degree in public administration. He is due to graduate in May.
In ordering his removal, the administration has cited a little-used provision of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act allowing the deportation of any lawful permanent resident whose presence in the country the secretary of state has “reasonable grounds to believe” could harm US foreign policy.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 16 that taking part in “pro-Hamas events” runs counter to US foreign policy.
Khalil’s lawyers have said their client has no ties to Hamas, and have said he acted as a “mediator and negotiator” during the protests.
They also have said the administration is unlawfully targeting non-US citizens for removal based on protected speech, and asked Furman to immediately release Khalil.
Khalil’s wife, Noor Abdalla, is eight months pregnant with their first child and has not been able to travel to Louisiana to visit him.
Because the provision of the 1952 law used to justify Khalil’s deportation has been invoked so infrequently, it has been tested just once before, legal experts said.
The late federal Judge Maryanne Trump Barry — Trump’s older sister — found the provision unconstitutional in the 1990s in a case involving a former Mexican official wanted on criminal charges in his home country.
Barry said noncitizens in the United States legally could not be removed at the sole discretion of the secretary of state without a meaningful opportunity to be heard.
The administration of former President Bill Clinton appealed that ruling and it was reversed on a technicality that did not address the law’s constitutionality.