TANK STOLEN
A Bulgarian army officer and two German citizens were arrested on December 17 and charged with stealing a World War 2 German Maybach tank. They were caught in the process of stealing a second one. Both tanks are owned by the Defence Ministry. The theft and attempted theft took place between November and mid-December. The two tanks were near the town of Yambol, central Bulgaria, serving as dug-in firing points, part of an old defensive line build in the 1960s against possible attack from Greece and Turkey. Maybach tanks are highly valued by collectors and can change hands for about 50 000 euro.

COMMUNITY POLICING
Lack of interpreters was one of the problems facing Varna police department, Anna Nikolova, regional co-ordinator of the Open Society Institute’s Community Policing project, said on December 17. There were no legal procedures on police providing interpreters if a person in custody did not understand Bulgarian, she said. Police budgets lacked money for interpreters. The report presented by Nikolova evaluated the work of eight police departments in Varna region for the period June-August. Twenty-one detainees were interviewed. All said they knew their rights and described police officers’ attitude as professional and polite. No allegations of abuse or brutality by police were reported. Police departments lacked interrogation rooms and interviews took place in the offices of the police. Separate cells for female and child detainees were not available.

UNEMPLOYED
Sofia’s heating utility Toplofikatsia’s former boss Valentin Dimitrov has registered as unemployed, although investigators discovered millions of euro in foreign bank accounts held in the names of Dimitrov and his mother. Eighteen months ago, Dimitrov was arrested on charges of money laundering and misappropriation of funds. He spent a year in jail but was released after the trial did not start in the required legal period of one year. According to Prosecutor-General Boris Velchev, the charge sheet was already more than 1000 pages long.

LOST OPPORTUNITY
The fund for treatment of sick children abroad, set up by the Government with the purpose of collecting donations for expensive treatment of children, has to return about 500 000 leva to the state budget. The reason was that the fund failed to find a use of the money and they were left unspent. This means that 500 000 leva that could have been used for surgical operations, transplants and other medical procedures was not used. In total, 1.2 million leva was spent by the fund this year to send children abroad for treatment.

DEATH ON THE ROADS
Four people died after five road accidents that happened in just two days. On December 18, three people died in a collision between a bus with 50 passengers, a minibus and other motor vehicles. The driver of the bus allegedly caused the accident by reckless driving and overtaking without clear visibility. He is in critical condition. On December 19, a man died after a road accident near Varna. A total of 983 people died in Bulgaria this year in road accidents, with 9497 injured. The heavy festive season traffic is expected to mean that the by the end of the year, the number of road deaths will reach 1000.