The September 23 clashes in the southern Bulgarian village of Katunitsa and the ensuing wave of protest stirred altercations in Parliament Wednesday.

Center-right ruling party GERB faced a spate of requests for hearings aimed at shedding light on the failure to keep the situation under control.

Only one of the hearings proposed by the opposition was accepted, meaning that Deputy Interior Minister Veselin Vuchkov would be required to give an account of the incident and the follow-up Roma protests at the request of nationalist party Ataka.

GERB voted down the questioning of Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov, currently on leave due to the election campaign, and of Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, as well as a proposal of the right-wing Blue Coalition for the establishment of a parliamentary committee to study the actions of the police during the unrest.

Tsvetanov's hearing was requested by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), which insisted that the leave of absence was no excuse for the Interior Minister.

The proposal was rejected with 65 votes in favor, 23 votes against and 70 abstainees mostly from GERB's ranks.

Co-chair of the Blue Coalition Ivan Kostov stated that the right-wing formation had withdrawn its confidence in the Interior Minister and therefore demanded the formation of an ad-hoc committee that would analyze the adequacy of the actions of the Interior Ministry and the law-enforcement organs.

"He will come to tell us how well they handled the situation. We have withdrawn our confidence from this minister and we would not like to listen to him. It would be better to leave the evaluation of the police actions to a parliamentary committee", Kostov snapped.

Before that, Parliamentary Chair Tsetska Tsacheva cut short Ataka leader Volen Siderov's request that the Praliament observe a one-minute silence in memory of the 19-year-old boy killed in Katunitsa.

The call was rejected on the grounds of promoting disunity in the country.

Ataka also tried to win support for the idea that the Wednesday session be broadcast live due to "the extraordinary situation".

What it got in response were accusations voiced by BSP MP Georgi Pirinski of "anti-constitutional, anti-state, anti-Bulgarian and divisive behavior".

Yane Yanev, leader of the conservative Bulgarian Law, Order and Justice party (RZS), insisted that Prime Minister Borisov should come to Parliament with Tsvetanov's resignation.

He claimed that the incident was socially, not ethnically motivated, stressing that the social integrity of a number of groups had been damaged, with malice and helplessness showing through in response.

Ataka also failed to push forward a vote in Parliament on a declaration stating MPs' committment to adopting a package of measures and legal amendments aimed at combating "gypsy crime".

Throughout the parliamentary session, young visitors watching with keen interest could not refrain from voicing loud support for Ataka's pronouncements, which got them a warning from Tsacheva that they would be expelled unless the noise stopped.

The series of protests was triggered after 19-year-old Angel Petrov got run over by a mini-bus driven by an associate of notorious Roma boss Kiril Rashkov, aka Tsar Kiro on September 23.

On the following day, Rashkov's properties were set ablaze by a mob of football hooligans.

The tensions grew in Plovdiv on Sunday, the day of Petrov's funeral, when the police barely prevented clashes between a protest rally and local Roma in Roma-populated quarters Stolipinovo, Sheker Mahala, and Adzhisan Mahala.

The unrest in Southern Bulgaria quickly spread to other parts of the country, with the hit-and-run murder of Angel Petrov setting off waves of anti-Roma protests and riots.

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