The Sofia Court of Appeals has ordered that alleged crime boss and former undercover agent Alexei Petrov must remain in custody.

In a sitting lasting several hours on February 18 2010, the court ruled that Petrov should remain under arrest, together with Marcelo Djotolov, who was arrested alongside Petrov and five others on February 9 2010 as part of a police operation dubbed Octopus, aimed against an organised crime group.

This group, according to Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov, had been involved in racketeering, extortion, prostitution, gambling, trafficking of people, money laundering, tax evasion, influence peddling and economic offences, all in the past 10 years. After the arrest it became clear that Petrov had been working as Bulgarian secret services undercover agent since 2000.

The other five men who were also arrested were released on bail as the court found no grounds to keep them in custody.

In court, Petrov said that there was a plot against him by both Interior Ministry and the State Agency for National Security because he had conceptual differences with the way SANS had been run by Prime Minister Boiko Borissov and his policy on Bulgaria's economy and national security.

Up until September 2009, Petrov was a high-ranking SANS official but resigned from his post after Borissov's party GERB won the July 2009 elections for Parliament.

Petrov told the court on February 18 that his arrest was no surprise, given the campaign against him which had been conducted for the past several months.

He said that he expected investigators to start fabricating evidence against him, because, he said, so far nothing implicating him in any wrongdoing had been found in his home and office.

He said that Bulgarian banks were connected with his arrest because he previously had sent Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov a letter explaining how interest rates could be brought down. Dyankov has denied receiving such a letter.