¶1Don Victor Harbolt pro se.
¶2James Dean Teeters pro se.
¶3Bert C. Hura, U. S. Atty., and Frederick 0. Griffin, Jr., Asst. U. S. Atty., Kansas City, Mo., for appellees.
¶4Before LAY, STEPHENSON and WEBSTER, Circuit Judges.
¶6Appellants Don Harbolt and James Teeters are inmates at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. Each seeks, upon a variety of jurisdictional grounds,1 2to obtain an early determination *792of the parole violation warrant presently-issued but unexecuted against them. Suit was filed against the United States Board Parole and jurisdiction in the Western District of Missouri was asserted by service upon the Board’s Regional Director at Kansas City, Missouri.
¶7No doubt the choice of forum was influenced by this Court’s opinion in Cleveland v. Ciccone, 517 F.2d 1082 (8th Cir. 1975), holding that a federal prisoner has a constitutional right to an early hearing on an outstanding parole violation warrant, which, although unexecuted, is affecting the conditions of his confinement. The Tenth Circuit, in which appellants’ place of confinement is located, has taken a contrary view. See Small v. Britton, 500 F.2d 299 (10th Cir. 1974).2
¶8The District Court construed the complaint liberally to state a petition for a writ of habeas corpus under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 challenging conditions of confinement. Without conclusively determining the sufficiency of jurisdiction, the District Court dismissed the petition for improper venue since the prisoners were not confined within the Western District of Missouri. We reverse.
¶9In a separate opinion filed today, we hold that service upon a Regional Director of the Board of Parole supplies habeas corpus jurisdiction over the Board of Parole as custodian to challenge the due process of its parole revocation procedures. McCoy v. United States Board of Parole, 537 F.2d 962, No. 75-1804 (8th Cir. 1976). We there recognized that the District Court for the Western District of Missouri, the district in which the Regional Director was found, could appropriately transfer the case to any other district where the action could originally have been instituted.
¶10The District Court below apparently assumed that venue must be located in the place where the prisoner is physically confined. We do not think that Braden v. 30th Judicial Circuit Court, 410 U.S. 484, 93 S.Ct. 1123, 35 L.Ed.2d 443 (1973), mandates this conclusion. Braden was concerned with the location of the custodian, not the prisoner. Since venue in the Western District of Missouri was not improper, the petition could not properly be dismissed on mere grounds of balance of convenience. If the court felt that the balance of convenience dictated that the District of Kansas was the most appropriate forum, its authority was limited to transferring the action to that district. See 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a); Norwood v. Kirkpatrick, 349 U.S. 29, 30-32, 75 S.Ct. 544, 99 L.Ed. 789 (1955).
¶11We therefore vacate the judgment of dismissal and remand to the District Court for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion. On remand, the District Court may, of course, consider transferring the case to any more appropriate district where this action could have been brought in the first instance. See 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a).