A hundred-year-old mosque was burnt to the ground on October 7 2009 in the Bulgarian town of Nikopol. Firefighters arrived swiftly on the scene, according to several eyewitness reports, but the blaze already had engulfed the entire structure.
 
Imam Gyursel Mimishev told Bulgarian National Television (BNT) that the fire was an act of arson by local activists from the Movement of Rights and Freedoms (MRF), the party led and supported in the main by Bulgarians of ethnic Turkish descent. He said that their motivation was that he is a supporter of Prime Minister Boiko Borissov's GERB Government.
 
Nikopol mayor Valerii Zheliaskov rejected allegations that this was a case of politically-motivated arson. He said it was simply an accident. Police have declined to comment as the investigation is continuing.
 
On October 7 2009, Mimishev told Bulgarian news agency BTA: "I believe that this was arson – mind you, not emanating from ethnic hatred or anything like that, but politically-motivated".
 
Zheliaskov said: "There is no ethnic tension in Nikopol, and there never was. People here get on with their daily lives, and religion here is not an issue, I don’t believe that this was perpetrated with any sinister motive, I think it was an accident".
 
There were 110 attacks on mosques and Islamic places of worship in the country in 2008, according to Bulgaria’s Chief Mufti. He said that no one had been brought to justice. Authorities say that in 2000 another mosque in Nikopol was torched, but the perpetrators were still at large.

Meanwhile authorities have pledged 25,000 leva for the restoration of the two mosques in Nikopol and the one in Blagoevgrad, which was also recently subjected to acts of vandalism, a Government press release announced on October 8