Bulgaria has not requested extradition from Lebanon of Bourgas attack suspects – Prosecutor-General
Bulgaria has not sent Lebanon a judicial order of arrest for extradition of the two suspects in the Bourgas Airport July 2012 terrorist attack, Bulgaria’s Prosecutor-General Sotir Tsatsarov said on February 14, denying earlier media reports to this effect.
He told journalists that documentation had been sent to Lebanon but reports that a court request for detention or extradition of specific individuals were not true.
On February 12, a delegation headed by the Bulgarian embassy in Beirut’s chargé d’affaires, Plamen Tsolov, handed Lebanese foreign minister Adnan Mansour a memorandum related to a judicial co-operation request regarding the investigation into the Bourgas Airport bombing, in which five Israeli citizens, a Bulgarian and the carrier of the bomb died.
Tsolov and other officials have declined to disclose further details of the contents of the documentation handed to Lebanon.
After Bulgaria announced on February 5 that its investigation led to people involved in the military wing of Hezbollah, Lebanon’s prime minister said that his country would co-operate in the investigation.
On February 14, Bulgarian news agency Focus said that L’Orient-Le Jour, citing sources from the Lebanese General Security Directorate, had reported Lebanese authorities as denying that the two Hezbollah military wing members suspected in the Bourgas Airport attack had legally entered Lebanon.
Earlier, Bulgaria handed Europol details of the identities of the two alleged accomplices, Lebanese citizens holding, respectively, Australian and Canadian dual nationality.
