Bulgarian Deputy Minister Quits Over Nazi salute

Bulgarian Deputy Minister whose nationalist party recently joined a coalition with the center-right resigned on Wednesday after a photo emerged of him doing a Nazi salute, writes the Times of Israel.

The image, taken in 2008, shows Pavel Tenev raising his right arm in front of a soldier in a wax museum in Paris.

The scandal broke after Bulgarian media discovered the picture on Tenev’s Facebook account.

‘’I do not have the Nazi ideology’’, Tenev said at a press conference in Sofia, adding that his gesture had been meant in a ‘’mocking’’ way.

“The tension this has created is not helpful for the government, so I’ve asked to be released from my duties,” he said.

UP chief and vice-premier Valeri Simeonov said the publication of Tenev’s picture had been “silly.”

Recalling a visit as a student to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany in the 1970s, Simeonov told Bulgarian newspaper Sega: “Who knows what funny pictures we took back then.”

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