SARAJEVO (Reuters) – Bosnian police detained former Dinamo Zagreb coach Zoran Mamic on Wednesday on an international arrest warrant issued by Croatia after he had fled to Bosnia to evade serving a jail sentence for fraud, police said.
“He is in the premises of the State Investigation and Protection Agency and will be handed over to the Bosnia-Herzegovina court,” SIPA spokeman Luka Miladinovic said.
After Mamic’s four year and eight months prison sentence was confirmed in March, he failed to show up to serve the sentence last week.
It turned out that he escaped to Bosnia as he is also a Bosnian citizen.
The Croatian court has said it expected the Bosnian court to decide whether there were legal conditions for Mamic to be extradited to Croatia.
Mamic requested to serve the sentence in Bosnia, but Croatia
refused.
He was sentenced to jail together with his brother Zdravko Mamic, former Dinamo executive president.
They had been charged together with another former Dinamo official and one tax expert for tax evasion worth 12.2 million kuna ($1.98 million) and for embezzlement of 116 million kuna from transfers of players from Dinamo.
The Mamic brothers denied any wrongdoing. Zdravko Mamic, also with a dual citizenship, now lives in Bosnia which refused to extradite him. .
Zoran Mamic resigned in March as Dinamo coach.
(Reporting by Daria Sito-Sucic; Editing by Angus MacSwan)
