SOFIA, Feb 9 — Bulgarian authorities said yesterday they found the bodies of three suspects wanted over a triple murder linked to an allegedly shady NGO which one prosecutor said was like something out of TV series Twin Peaks.
The three — two men and a 15-year-old boy — were found yesterday, dead from gunshots, in a camping van close to Mount Okolchitsa, a peak in western part of the Balkan Mountains, national police chief Zahari Vaskov told a news conference.
Their bodies were discovered some 80km from a burnt-out mountain lodge where the triple murder was discovered a week ago, on February 2.
The three men murdered in the lodge — also by gunshot — all belonged to an NGO called the National Protected Areas Control Agency (NAKZT).
Vaskov said the triple murder, and the three bodies found yesterday in the caravan — which also belonged to NAKZT — amounted to “an unprecedented crime, at least for Bulgaria”.
He said the gunshots appeared to have taken place inside the van, and investigators were looking into “all possible hypotheses”.
NAKZT presents itself as a mountain rangers operation which also hosts holiday camps for youngsters.
But two years ago it was accused in a criminal complaint of alleged “sexual abuse of children” and turned out to possess a “paramilitary” apparatus, the interim head of Bulgaria’s State Agency for National Security, Denyo Denev, said on Wednesday.
Bulgaria’s acting prosecutor general, Borislav Sarafov, on Wednesday told a news conference that NAKZT was believed to engage in activities not “in conformity with God’s will, or the interests of society, the country and of children”.
He evoked a similarity in the case with Twin Peaks, the US TV show about an FBI agent making bizarre and horrific discoveries in a fictional town as he investigates a murder. — AFP
