������Ƶ

SARAJEVO: The separatist president of the Serb part of Bosnia vowed to defy a court ruling banning him from political office for six years on Friday and said he would seek help from both Russia and US President Donald Trump.

Milorad Dodik was responding to a ruling by Bosnia’s appeals court upholding a sentence handed down to him for defying the orders of the international peace envoy, whose role is to prevent multi-ethnic Bosnia sliding back into civil war.

Dodik told reporters he would continue to go to work.

“I do not accept the verdict,” he told reporters. “I will seek help from Russia and I will write a letter to the US administration.”

He said he would ask his associates not to communicate with ambassadors from the European Union, which has a peacekeeping force in Bosnia to ensure stability that has deployed reserve forces over the crisis.

The sentence, handed down to Dodik in February for defying the Constitutional Court as well as the peace envoy, included a one-year prison term that under Bosnia’s legal system can possibly be exchanged for a fine.

His lawyer Goran Bubic said his team would appeal Friday’s appeals court ruling to the Constitutional Court and seek a temporary delay of the implementation of the verdict pending its decision.

Dodik’s conviction in February sparked uproar in Bosnia’s autonomous Serb Republic, triggering Bosnia’s worst political crisis since the conflict, which killed around 100,000 people in 1992-5.

A pro-Russian nationalist who seeks to split his region from Bosnia, Dodik responded with measures to reduce the state’s presence in the Serb Republic by ordering lawmakers to ban the state’s prosecutor, court, and intelligence agency.

The constitutional court then temporarily suspended the regional parliament’s legislation as endangering the constitutional and legal order and sovereignty of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the formal name of the country.

Dodik is a long-time advocate of the secession of the Serb-dominated region, which along with the Bosniak-Croat Federation makes up Bosnia. The crisis precipitated by his separatist push represents one of the biggest threats to peace in the Balkans since the conflicts that followed Yugoslavia’s collapse.

BELGRADE: Six people, including a former minister, were arrested in Serbia on Friday over a train station disaster in which 16 people died.

The concrete canopy of the newly renovated station in the northern city of Novi Sad collapsed on November 1, 2024 and was widely blamed on corruption and poor oversight.

It sparked a wave of student-led protests and led to the resignation of prime minister Milos Vucevic and the fall of his government.

The public prosecutor’s office in Novi Sad opened an investigation into the accident and deaths.

In February, the public prosecutor’s office for organized crime opened another probe into the corruption aspect of the case and Friday’s arrests were linked to this.

The six, all suspected of abuse of office, include former construction, transport and infrastructure minister Tomislav Momirovic as well as former acting director of the state-run Serbian Railway Infrastructure company Nebojsa Surlan, prosecutors said.

They said nine other people, including former transport minister Goran Vesic who was among the first to resign after the accident, were being sought.

According to the Nova.rs news site, Vesic was hospitalized and underwent emergency surgery on Friday.

Two companies — China Railway International and China Communications Construction (CRI-CCC) — as well as France’s Egis and Hungary’s Utiber were in charge of the railway station works.

According to the prosecutor’s office, the two former ministers and three other suspects enabled CRI — CCC to charge more than $1.2 billion for work and then carry out additional work worth more than $64 million.

This enabled CRI-CCC to obtain an “illegal financial gain” of more than $18 million, the statement said.

Since the accident, protests have been growing across Serbia, with some bringing hundreds of thousands of people to the streets to demand a transparent investigation and early elections.

A new protest was due on Friday evening in the capital Belgrade to commemorate nine months since the accident.