Bulgaria PM Sees Brazen Robberies as Plot, Vows Tough Response

Bulgaria's PM Boyko Borisov has vowed tough meansures against the surge of robberies the country saw on Monday. Photo by BGNES

Bulgaria’s Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, said Tuesday he believed the several high-profile crimes the country saw the previous day did not coincide by accident.

“I am certain that the robbery on the Trakiya Highway, the robbery in the Fantastico hypermarket, and the other criminal acts were not accidental. They coincided with the most important visit in support of the Bulgarian government and state, and the news about it were squeezed out by the news about these crimes,” Borisov declared referring to Monday’s visit to Sofia of newly-elected EU President Herman Van Rompuy, who lauded the government’s efforts to tackle the country’s problems.

The same day Bulgaria saw a highway robbery followed by a shootout in which a gangster was killed by the police, a robbery of a hypermarket in Sofia from which BGN 2 M were stolen, a robbery of a mobile phones store in Sofia, where the robbers got away with BGN 50 000, and a raid on a bank branch and Mayor’s office in the Black Sea resort of Sveti Vlas, where the criminals stole about BGN 50 000 in total.

Borisov congratulated and thanked the police officers who participated in the operations against the criminal groups on Monday, and said they would be rewarded.

“The groups who committed those crimes are well known. Sometimes the criminals are not lucky,” the Prime Minister said.

“When I was Chief Secretary of the Interior Ministry, those groups were in the arrest, and there were no highway robberies. Unfortunately, they have been freed by the second-instance courts later. And the robberies resumed immediately. I explicitly remember a tape in which the gangsters were threatening a witness known as “No. 5”,” said Borisov during his visit to Parliament Tuesday.

The Prime Minister, who was Chief Secretary of Bulgaria’s Interior Ministry in 2001-2005, referred to the highway robberies gang known as “The Crocodiles”, whose member Dimitar Mitrev – Bogrovetsa was shot dead by the police on Monday.

Meanwhile, the opposition Bulgarian Socialist Party demanded that Interior Minister, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, be summoned to an emergency Parliament hearing over the criminal wave in the country.

According to the BSP Spokesperson, Korneliya Ninova, the ruling GERB party resorted to the old methods used by Borisov when he was Interior Ministry Secretary, i.e. blaming its failures in fighting crime on the weaknesses of the judicial system. Ninova’s statement referred to a comment made earlier during the day by Minister Tsvetanov.

“How could criminals fear the law when one of them was out free even though he had a 12-year sentence,” Bulgaria’s Interior Minister, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, said regarding Kaloyan Batsov, one of the members of “the Crocodiles” gang, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2008 but was then set free as he was appealing the sentence.

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