Bulgarian Foreign Ministry condemns daubing of football club graffiti on Hiroshima monument
Bulgaria’s Foreign Ministry said on October 16 that it was indignant about the daubing of graffiti of the name of a Sofia football club at the Monument of Peace in the Japanese city of Hiroshima.
About 140 000 people died in the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, when in the closing stages of the Second World War, the US Air Force dropped on the Japanese city the first atomic bomb to be used in combat.
Japanese media reported that inscriptions had been daubed on a wall close to the Monument of Peace in Hiroshima. Photographs showed that one of three read, in Cyrillic script, Loko Sofia.
Lokomotiv Sofia 1929 is a second-league football team in the Bulgarian capital city.
In a Facebook post, Bulgaria’s Foreign Ministry said that it was outrageous and utterly inappropriate to express football fandom on what was a Unesco world cultural heritage monument in memory of the victims of the nuclear bombardment.
“We categorically condemn the assault and offer apologies to Japan, a friendly country,” the post said.
Japanese media reported that police were searching for the perpetrators.
