Bulgaria's Foreign Ministry is at a loss after a special commission published the names of another 75 diplomats who have been collaborators of the communist secret police.

The Bulgarian daily 24 Chasa (24 Hours) informs Thursday the latest exposures will require an update of the list of diplomats to be recalled over their DS past. This list was supposed to be submitted with President, Georgi Parvanov, on Monday.

The latest probe of the special Bulgarian panel, investigating the communist-era police files, known as the Files' Commission, has included checks of the Head Secretaries, Directors General and Department Heads at the Foreign Ministry.

The scandal flared in the beginning of the year when the Files Commission revealed that 192 diplomats, out of 432, who worked for the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry after the fall of the communist regime in 1989, had records of ties with the former State Security.

Among those 192, 41 (or 45%) are current heads of Bulgarian diplomatic missions, including the Bulgarian ambassadors in the UK, Germany, Italy, UN (New York and Geneva), Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Turkey, Russia, China, Sweden, Romania, Norway, Japan, Qatar, Kuwait, Syria, Egypt, Bosnia, Greece, the Vatican, Slovakia, Albania, Georgia, Armenia, and Venezuela.

Bulgarian Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, asked for 33 of them to be recalled by the President, but no diplomatic terms have been affected so far, mostly over the difficulties to find replacements.

Out of the 75, just announced, 29 are current employees of the Foreign Ministry. One of them is a Directorate Head, while 7 are Department Heads. Ognyan Champoev, the temporary head of Bulgaria's permanent representation at the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe, OSCE, based in Vienna, is also on the list.

31 out the 75 have been full-time employees of DS and 9 have been trained by the Soviet KGB.?

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