There was no illegal eavesdropping, Bulgaria’s Interior Ministry chief secretary says
An investigation by senior prosecutors had not established any illegal eavesdropping by the Interior Ministry while it was not true that any ministry officials had obstructed the investigation or destroyed evidence, ministry chief secretary Kalin Georgiev said on April 17 2013.
Georgiev, speaking in an interview with public broadcaster Bulgarian National Television two days after the prosecutors’ investigation unleashed a political furore, with rival parties calling for former interior minister and GERB party election campaign chief Tsvetan Tsvetanov to withdraw from politics, implied that political parties and the media had deliberately been misleading about what prosecutors had said.
“The prosecution did not mention illegal wiretapping at the Interior Ministry and I am amazed at the comments on the topic.”
He denied that there had been sabotage of the recording equipment.
A senior official, Radko Dimitrov, has been suspended from his post and is facing criminal charges for alleging deleting records. The suspension was ordered by Petya Purvanova, Interior Minister in the caretaker government, and on April 16 Prime Minister Marin Raykov said that this had been done at his insistence.
However, Georgiev said that there had not been deliberate erasing of material but that this was a technical glitch.
He said that the initiation of pre-trial proceedings against specific employees of the ministry did not mean that the Interior Ministry had been conducting illegal wiretapping and did not imply that they were guilty.
Asked about the statement by prosecutors that they had established that a vehicle equipped for surveillance had been out on the streets of Sofia while the official record showed it as having been in the garage, Georgiev said that he believed that in the course of the investigation, the reasons and an explanation for the use of the vehicle on those days would be found.
“I am sure that it will be a logical explanation, connected with the activities of the Interior Ministry to protect national security and fight organised crime,” he said.
(Photo: Everson Silva/sxc.hu)
