Republika Srpska (RS) President Milorad Dodik said on Friday that the police force of the Bosnian Serb entity would arrest Banimir Glavas if they found him on the RS territory and take the necessary steps to extradite him to Croatia as soon as possible.

Glavas was sentenced in a retrial to seven years in prison, pending appeal, for war crimes committed against Serb civilians in the eastern Croatian city of Osijek in 1991. He took advantage of the fact that he had not been remanded in custody and fled to neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina.

He confirmed in a Facebook post on Tuesday evening that he is staying in the village of Drinovci, near Grude, in western Herzegovina, adding that he has no intention of spending “a single day in prison” any more and that he has “sought refuge” as a precaution while awaiting a final verdict.

The information has not been confirmed by any Bosnian police agency but Security Minister Nenad Nesic confirmed having requested an investigation to establish where and how Glavas had crossed the border and his exact whereabouts.

RS President Dodik was quoted by the local media as saying, “Glavas has revealed his location and nobody is reacting. A perpetrator of war crimes against Serbs feels safe in Bosnia and Herzegovina, that's unheard of.”

He added that he could not allow such persons to evade justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina, regardless of the fact that they have BiH citizenship.

At the initial trial in 2009, Glavas and the other accused in the case were sentenced to prison sentences of several years, but the final verdict was annulled by the Constitutional Court in 2015. By then, Glavas had served most of his eight-year sentence in prisons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he fled before the first verdict was handed down.

Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina signed an extradition agreement that went into force in 2014 but it does not refer to persons charged with war crimes or criminal offences committed before the agreement was signed.