Police in the Balkans are searching for a former Playboy model who has gone on the run after being sentenced to prison for setting up a honey trap in a plot to kill a mafia gangster.
Authorities in Bosnia-Hercegovina have issued an Interpol arrest warrant for Slobodanka Tosic, who posed topless for men’s magazines and appeared on the cover of Playboy in 2008.
The 30-year-old model, who was named Miss Bosnia at the age of 19, was convicted earlier this year of arranging to meet a mafia boss, Djordje Zdrale, for a date and then betraying him to his rival Darko Elez, who then attempted to have him killed.
Zdrale was wounded in the assassination attempt, which took place in 2006, but managed to escape. The model was charged as an accomplice to the plot.
A court handed down a two-and-a-half year jail sentence in March, which was upheld by an appeals court in July.
Bosnian prosecutors said she had links to “one of the largest groups of organised crime” in the country. But she has failed to present herself to the authorities and is now the subject of an international hunt. She was last known to be living with her parents in eastern Bosnia.
“Upon a demand of the State Court of Bosnia-Hercegovina an Interpol arrest warrant was issued for Slobodanka Tosic,” a spokesman for the tribunal that convicted her told AFP.
The model was arrested in an undercover operation codenamed “Operation Doll” last year in Croatia, after reportedly fleeing her home country.
She was extradited back to Bosnia on an international arrest warrant.
Aside from modelling, she also appeared on the Serbian version of the reality TV show Survivor.
Zdrale, the target of the assassination plot, was jailed for 20 years for the murder of a police officer, but was brought from his prison cell to testify against Miss Tosic.
Elez, the man who tried to kill his rival with the help of Miss Tosic, was among 32 people who were charged with gangland murders and raids on cash delivery vans, post offices and banks. The crime syndicate he led was dismantled in a major police operation in 2012 and he was jailed for nine years.
