The Supreme Court of Cassation (SCC) returned the case of the murder of 24-year-old Bulgarian law student Martin Borilski to the Veliko Turnovo Court of Appeals and overruled the acquittals of Georgi Zhelyazkov and Stoyan Stoichkov, who are accused of his murder in Paris in 2000.
 
On May 18 2009, the SCC decided that the case, which was well publicised by Bulgarian and European media and elicited a harsh reaction from France's ambassador to Bulgaria, Etienne de Poncins, had to be reopened.
 
The decision comes after months of campaigning by Borilski’s family and friends. The case, which dragged on for years and ended with the acquittal of Zhelyazkov and Stoichkov, was described in some quarters as a test of Bulgaria’s allegedly slow-moving judiciary.
 
The Shoumen Regional Court passed the "not guilty" verdict in March 2008. In January 2009 when the Veliko Turnovo Court of Appeals acquitted the two men, Poncins expressed his indignation in an official statement.
 
Back in 2000, after several days of unanswered phone and text messages, friends of Borilski's had alerted the French authorities. He was discovered dead in his Paris flat on July 20. He had been stabbed more than 90 times and his skull smashed with a dumbbell.

Two years later, both Zhelyazkov and Stoichkov were tried for Borilski's alleged murder.
 
All evidence gathered by French investigators, including parts of Zhelyazkov's skin and blood under his nails, was more or less dismissed by the defence as failing to comply with the Bulgarian penal procedure code.

Zhelyazkov and Borilski had been high school classmates in Varna, and stayed in touch when the former arrived in 1999 to study in Paris.

The French investigation had examined two possible theories for Borilski's murder. One was that he had been pressed by the two to enter a criminal ring engaged in processing and distributing fake credit cards and passports. According to this theory, Borilski refused to do this and threatened to inform French police. The second was that Borilski was killed for money.
 
Because the victim and the defendants were all from Varna, the case had to be tried first at the district level and then at the court of appeals in Varna. Instead, the case was transferred to the Shoumen district court.
 
According to initial information, prosecutors and judges in Varna officially withdrew from the case. Media reports have speculated that this was because Zhelyazkov's father, Borislav, was a former deputy head of the prosecutor's office in Varna.

Borislav Zhelyazkov is currently one of the city's most influential lawyers.

Dnevnik daily reported that the case was transferred to Shoumen and that the trial began only after, in 2003, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister at the time, had asked his Bulgarian counterpart, Georgi Petkanov, about progress in the case. In 2008, during her visit to Bulgaria, French justice minister Rachida Dati discussed the case with her Bulgarian counterpart, Miglena Tacheva, the French embassy said on January 22.
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