On August 14, Irish citizen Eoin McGrath was called to the police department in the south-western city of Blagoevgrad, where he has lived with his wife since 2003. He was questioned by police officers and accused of being the anonymous sender of a bomb threat, via e-mail, at the beginning of February 2007, which referred to the Bansko ski lift owners Ulen.
On August 15, McGrath’s wife Fidanka Bacheva-McGrath was also called to the police station and questioned. She has been the the Balkan co-ordinator of CEE Bankwatch Network since 2004, a non-governmental South East European organisation monitoring international financial institutions’ investments in the region, and their environmental friendliness. Bacheva-McGrath works on the Cyanide-free Bulgaria and Kresna Gorge campaigns, as well as on Balkan oil and gas transit infrastructure, such as Bourgas-Vlora (AMBO), Bourgas-Alexandroupolis and Constanta-Trieste oil and gas pipelines.
Bacheva-McGrath told The Sofia Echo that the police said they had a video record from an internet club in Sofia. According to the police, her husband was in the video and it had been proven that the anonymous bomb threat was sent from the same internet club.
The threat was meant to disrupt the ski season in Bankso and the ski slopes were evacuated and remained closed for several days.
McGrath is a graduate from Belfast University in information management and now works as a freelance software developer. The police proposed that he was capable of sending such a threat but McGrath said he was not in Sofia when the e-mail was sent.
In 2004 McGrath worked for the civil environmental internet portal Bluelink.net. He also taught English in Blagoevgrad and travelled to Austria to teach there as well. “However, obviously the police were more interested in which organisations he was a member of…” Bacheva-McGrath told The Sofia Echo.
She said the police asked her husband where his wife worked and they said they knew that she was engaged in environmental protection (the bomb threat was sent by a phantom eco-organisation called Ravnodenstvie). The police also told McGrath they knew he had sent the e-mail threat and urged him to confess. He said he and his wife had nothing to do with the bomb threat.
McGrath told The Sofia Echo that he and Bacheva-McGrath hoped that this would be the end of this case and the police will not disturb them anymore. “I guess it is because of Fidakna working for Za Zemiata (For the Earth environmental organisation),” he said. “Maybe it's because of the (recent) problems with bloggers (publishing environmental articles on the internet; one of them was also called and questioned by the police in July 2007),” McGrath said.
“We should not forget that the Bansko bomb scare was sent shortly after the Razlog road blockades against the Natura 2000 network,” Bacheva-McGrath told The Sofia Echo. “Around that time there was a strong campaign to ‘demonise’ environmental organisations and present them as parasitic and even criminal elements in our society,” she said. “The recent actions of the police against environmentalist and bloggers in relation to the Strandja protests were also rather disturbing. Therefore the ‘standard questioning’ by the police about my and my husband’s affiliation with environmental organisations, and furthermore our supposed association to a serious crime such as the eco-terrorist threat, is intimidating to say the least.”
She and McGrath married in July 2006 after they met in Timisoara, Romania, where they were both working for the European Union European Voluntary Service programme. Bacheva-McGrath studied South East European studies at the American University in Bulgaria, and ecology at Columbia University, and Central European University, Budapest.
Green Policy Institute executive director Petko Kovachev spoke to The Sofia Echo about the case. He said the accusations against the McGrath family were “an attack against the environmental protection sector in Bulgaria”. He called them “a provocation and an attempt to frighten the active environmentalists in the country”. According to Kovachev, this was not because environmentalists cannot be interrogated when there are reasons, but because currently the Ministry of Interior (the MI) is using the Bansko case to retaliate against the events and protests from June and July 2007. “I have grounds to believe that neither Eoin and Fidanka, nor Rossen Aleksov, who is also connected to environmental protection and who the police also questioned, have done what they have been accused of,” Kovachev said.
He said he has grounds to believe the allegations of retaliation and intimidating the Bulgarian environmentalists “and all thinking people who are not afraid to express their position publicly”. Kovachev gave his reasons: “When the information about the internet-threat to detonate the Bansko avalanche was received, I immediately undertook steps to clarify whether it was really possible that someone from our circle could have done it. Other colleagues did the same and the result was negative. In ‘our circle’ I include the normal NGOs, their members and activists and not some self-promoters such as Amadeus (Krustev) or the ex-cops and military men, who have lately become involved with the green movement, or the Mafiosi directly.”
Kovachev said his second reason to believe in the allegations of retaliation against and intimidation of Bulgarian environmentalists was that the bomb threat showed a “rich imagination”, as well as not knowing the mentality of Bulgarian environmentalists. “There were even parts from literature and bad attempts to imitate knowledge about the problems and facts from the NGOs’ activities,” he said.
Kovachev also said that after the bomb threat no one from his more active colleagues or someone else was taken in for questioning “or even for a conversation concerning the problem”. “It is odd that the the MI has been waiting so long (more than half an year) to start questioning ‘environmentalists’. In addition, Eoin is not an NGO member or activist.” According to Kovachev, after the the MI’s actions “failed at the protests in Sofia and the country and it now has the image of an institution that disregards human rights, it starts an investigation”. He was surprised that despite the fact that, as the the MI said, the investigation was being conducted in co-operation with Interpol, the rights of the accused were not respected. According to Kovachev, the investigation was conducted in co-operation with the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor of the KGB, who he claims are not aware of things like human rights.
Kovachev also said that after the Blagoevgrad police said that they had a video record, it raised the questions as to whether Eoin McGrath had been followed, whether this was by the Special Investigation Agencies, who gave a permit for this and why McGrath was followed and recorded.
He also said that if the Blagoevgrad police were sure of their allegations, they would have questioned McGrath in the presence of a lawyer and a translator because “with such serious accusations the right thing is for him to be fully aware of what it is all about”.
Instead Kovachev claims psychological pressure was applied and McGrath was advised to “confess because otherwise it would become worse”.
Kovachev said that the the MI did not pay any attention to a version that was shown to them “via other channels”, about who would have benefitted from such a threat. “I affirm that the concessionaire of Bansko ski runs Ulen and the institutions, organisations and financial circles connected to it deserve, much more, to be questioned than the environmentalists or their relatives.” Furthermore he said that it is “interesting whether the the MI investigates this claim and if yes, how far they will go with it, the version that the threat was carried out by competitors, which was what the Bansko mayor said a few days after the event”.
According to Kovachev the the MI has to answer whether the actions of the Blagoevgrad police are a political order for actions against “peaceful citizens” and if the MI claims the opposite, it has to prove this by finding the real perpetrators of the threat.
