Bulgarian President Georgi Purvanov was a secret collaborator with one of the units of the country’s communist-era secret services, the committee on the declassification of the secret services’ files said.

The information was published on the National Assembly official website.

Purvanov was recruited on October 4 1989 and his codename was Gotse, Focus news agency said.

He was removed from the list of active collaborators in the mid-1990s.

Purvanov’s involvement with the former security services has been the subject of several media reports for more than a year. In 2006, just before the presidential election, in which Purvanov successfully sought a second term in office, the opposition forced him to make a semi-confession about his relationship with the former security services, mediapool.bg said.

Purvanov said that he had taken part in the “editing of a history book on Macedonia.”