The scandal caused by the resignation of Iliya Iliev, former chief secretary of the Interior Ministry, reached Parliament on January 8 after the ruling Bulgarian Socialist Party asked for an ad hoc committee to be formed to investigate whether there was police protection of drug trafficking in Bulgaria.

It was a surprise when Iliev resigned on November 28 last year. He said that he had been misled when asked to authorise a police secret operation.

On January 1, now-retired Iliev told the media that the operation had been about intercepting four tons of drugs, but this had not happened. Instead, police arrested Montenegrin-born Budimir Kujovic and three other Bulgarians on December 29 and 30 and seized a total of 120kg of high-quality heroin. On January 1, Iliev said that in order to seize the four tons of drugs he had been asked to approve the issuing of a Bulgarian passport to Kujovic as part of a plan worked out by police in the town of Razgrad. The plan was to let Kujovic into Bulgaria and later intercept the drugs and Kujovic himself. Iliev did not fulfil the legal requirement to inform Interior Minister Roumen Petkov about the operation. The failure of the operation led to Iliev accepting responsibility and resigning, Iliev told the media.

On January 2, Petkov told reporters that chief police commissioner Todor Dimov had been dismissed as head of Razgrad police department because of the failed operation. Two other Razgrad officers were demoted in rank.

Dimov had exceeded his powers and had used his position for the benefit of third parties, Petkov said.

“Dimov misled Iliev, who signed off on the operation without having the authority to do so, which meant that Iliev committed an administrative crime,” Petkov said.

According to Bulgarian law, a false passport can be issued to a person only if the person is a protected witness or a secret police collaborator, but Kujovic was neither. Most of all, the issuing of a false passport must be approved by a court. Further, in February last year, Kujovic was given a two-year suspended sentence with a three-year probation period for entering Bulgaria illegally and staying in the country with fake identity documents.

Following the example of his two former superiors, Dimov headed for the media on January 7. Dimov told commercial TV Nova Televisia that he felt himself to be the victim in the Kujovic case. “First my identity was revealed, and now everybody knows that I have worked against Kujovic, and now, in my position as a former police officer, I feel that my life and the lives of my family are under threat. The same applies to several other colleagues whose identities were also revealed by Petkov.”

A statement by Dimov that the heroin that had been supposed to go through Bulgaria from Turkey to Western Europe had not been the primary goal of the operation, spawned a series of news conferences.

“It is not the heroin that passes though Bulgaria that matters but the amphetamines produced in Bulgaria,” Dimov said. “We are talking about great amounts of money in this case because production means profit for the producers while it is only the ‘mule’ that is getting paid for transporting the heroin through Bulgaria,” he said.

Dimov said that current Interior Ministry chief secretary Valentin Petrov, who replaced Iliev, had shown a special interest in Dimov’s work against Kujovic.

“Frankly I was warned in the beginning by some colleagues not to work on Kujovic because I would be ‘fried’ in a sense. These were colleagues who had worked on Kujovic before and had been punished for it by Petrov.”

“What later happened was that one weekend Petrov personally came to Razgrad and collected all the information we had on the case, which is a highly unusual practice,” Dimov said.

As for issuing a passport to Kujovic and the “legendary four tons of heroin”, Dimov said: “We had information that Kujovic was making himself a fake passport and we asked Iliev to let him get it. As for the four tons, we are talking in long-term perspective of course.”

As to Petkov’s statement that Dimov had misled Iliev, Dimov said: “The source of all this is the internal conflict going on within the ministry, a struggle for power mixed with economic interests.”

He said that drug traffickers had former ministry employees working for them who could easily identify undercover police collaborators.

“There are even current ministry employees working for the drug mafia,” Dimov said.

Information on what had been a secret operation, revealed by Iliev and Petkov, added to his fears for his life and the life of the collaborator.

“I am ready to give more details on the case but only before a parliamentary investigative committee.”

Hours after Dimov’s interview, Petrov responded to his accusations. “Indeed I collected all the documents on the case on a non-working day because I feared that documents proving that police officers had acted against the law could be destroyed,” Petrov told a news conference.

There was no evidence that police officers had protected drug trafficking in Bulgaria, Petrov said.

“Dimov’s statement that I have any kind of interest in this case is ridiculous,” Petrov said. “I would never have signed a document issuing a fake passport to someone like Kujovic. This is not a regular thing in the ministry as some former colleagues are trying to imply.”

Petrov said that he had sent all documents to the Military Prosecutor’s Office and had asked them to investigate Dimov’s statements.

On January 8, the controversy gained momentum when the ruling Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) asked for an ad-hoc committee of Parliament to be formed to investigate the issue.

On Nova Televisia, Atanas Atanassov, an MP for the right-wing Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria and former head of the National Intelligence Service, had an interesting theory to share about the Interior Ministry’s involvement in drug trafficking.

“We all remember that on November 26 last year, a Plovdiv police officer was arrested with 100kg of amphetamines in his motor vehicle. Besides the policeman, another person was arrested under the name SS. Sometime later, when the court had to rule on whether the two should be remanded in custody, a ruling was made only about the police officer. This means that that Interior Ministry had sent documents to the court only about the policeman, not SS. Later SS was described as a key witness, not as an organiser of the drug trafficking ring, as was first announced. Media reports, which no one has denied so far, said that SS was Stoyan Stoichev, brother of Nevena Stoicheva who lives with Kujovic. The father of Stoichev, Angel Stoichev, is a high-ranking Interior Ministry official,” Atanassov said.

For Atanassov this meant some people still followed the practice of former communist Bulgaria when trading in amphetamines was “state policy”.

On January 9, Prosecutor-General Boris Velchev said that issuing a fake passport to a drug trafficker such as Kujovic was “extremely awkward because we had given someone we ourselves describe as a drug trafficker access to the EU”.

Velchev said that both Iliev and Dimov were being investigated.