What the Interior Ministry called "a slight surge in criminal activity" and the media "a boom" revived the spectre of the mid-1990s when Bulgaria was plagued by crime and insecurity.

In just six days, several million leva changed hands following a series of well-organised and daring armed raids. Not that such incidents were new to Bulgarians, but this was the busiest spate of armed robberies for years.

Recount
Everything began on December 10 when a private vault on Sofia’s Dondoukov Boulevard was robbed. Thieves managed to access the vault by using a client’s card. The two guards, who were pushed to the floor and handcuffed, were no match for the armed and masked attackers.

The gang had all the time they needed to open between 160 and 190 safety boxes and escape with the contents. All police traced, a few hours later, was the gang’s two abandoned vehicles with no sign of the thieves. Aside from the vault’s belongings, the gang also managed to steal a computer server holding all the CCTV recordings, leaving police with few clues. The total value of the robbers’ haul has been put at several million leva because the vault was also used by several jewellers in the area. That was probably why it was targeted. Police suspect that the hit had been organised months in advance with robbers probably renting a box to get the access card and acquaint themselves with the surroundings and the vault’s security system.         

Three days later, another well organised robbery hit Sofia’s Fantastico supermarket chain in Studentski Grad (Student Town) borough. A group of men broke into the premises at 12.40am and opened a metal safety box, escaping with more than two million leva, the weekend turnover of all Sofia’s Fantastico stores. Security guards apparently failed to notice the robbers who were able to work undetected with heavy equipment. At the time of the raid fireworks went off at a nearby party, also helping robbers to work unnoticed. The CCTV recording showed only one masked man, armed with a machine gun, guarding the door while others worked on opening the metal box.

A few hours later, on December 14, a store in Sofia’s Lyulin 7 borough was robbed, this time in broad daylight at 10.30am. Two masked and armed men robbed the store which is part of a shopping centre. At gunpoint, the woman behind the desk was forced to hand over the previous day’s takings of about 50 000 leva. Ironically, the store is less than 20 metres from a security guard’s booth hired by the shopping centre. Questioned after the incident, the guard said he saw nothing until the woman reported it.

December 14 saw another robbery, this time on the Black Sea coast, where thieves broke into Sveti Vlas resort town hall building and the premises of the local bank branch, escaping with a metal box and nearly 50 000 leva.

In Sofia the spate of raids continued on December 15 when three armed men plundered a store on Vassil Levski Boulevard at 3.30am and escaped with 500 leva. This time around, thanks to the quick reactions of the shop assistant and police, the men were arrested a few minutes later.

The next incident occurred on the morning of December 15 when a bank branch in Sofia was attacked. This time the assault was unsuccessful. Although robbers managed to enter the premises they later fled the scene, leaving the lock on the front door broken.

Conclusions
All the cases cited involved private companies in charge of their own security. In the aftermath, attention shifted to the lax security that had allowed robbers do their business unnoticed. Whether - in some cases - the robbers were aided by an insider is now a question for police,  but in some instances, such as the private vault and the Fantastico store, security was clearly inadequate. The fact that, in the case of the private vault, the 24-hour security of a vault in Sofia’s centre was left to just two people points to grave shortcomings, especially when robbers managed to seize the server holding CCTV recordings. This raises the question of why the server was put there and not elsewhere. In Fantastico’s case, police and media reacted with dismay that a company of that size had kept two million leva in cash in one location overnight without providing additional security.

Police promptly warned companies not to keep cash in unprotected areas over the holiday period lest the spate of December robberies proves contagious.