Secret Transit

Novinite Insider » EDITORIAL | February 15, 2008, Friday // 00:00
Bulgaria: Secret Transit Reporters Bogdana Lazarova (L) and Nikolay Hristov (R) presented the book "Affair" named after the program they are currently hosting on the air of Darik Radio. Photo by Yuliana Nikolova (Sofia Photo Agency)

"Secret Transit" is an investigating material on the state-organized trafficking in Bulgaria, published in the book, called "Affair", created by the crime reporters of the country's first private national radio Darik Bogdana Lazarova and Nikolay Hristov.

The book was published in June 2007 and is the first release, which includes radio materials, digging into crime issues that engage the interest of the Bulgarian society.

Novinite.com is going to publish the whole material, dividing it into several parts. Here is the first one:

"Secret Transit" was the official term for state-organized trafficking found in documents of the different departments of former State Security, as well as various government and party documents of totalitarian Bulgaria. The term "secret transit" or "secret transit trade," means organized and having the rank of a state policy trafficking of arms, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, gold, silver, luxury goods, and all types of trafficking banned by international laws but being extremely profitable.

Party-devised, state-organized and implemented by the State Security, trafficking brought billions of US dollars. Initially to the state. Billions later transferred abroad through international trade companies. Companies that craftily went outside state control and cut any relations with Bulgaria and its state organs but not with their creators. Billions now reinvested back here but under the cover of offshore zones and foreign registrations. And channels that not only survived but are now more active and profitable than ever. Trafficking channels that sparked all the gangster wars and for which all the ordered murders have been committed since the dawn of democracy.

The murders of Iliya Pavlov, Fatik, Todor Tolev, Stoil Slavov, and Ivan Todorov - The Doctor were all said to be related to the former State Security. The killings were even said to be a result of a war between inheritors of the Second and the Sixth departments of the State Security over the trafficking channels created by the services and referred to as "secret transit" in their documents.

The investigation on the "secret transit" is about the ones who created, controlled, and privatised the State Security channels that formed the basis for the organized crime in Bulgaria; the cooperation between State Security and transit trade monopolist Kintex; the old Shaban, who created the channels and his son Fatik, who continued in his footsteps; the fictitious firms through which the billions passed; the one who was on top of the pyramid.

Some of the documents that reveal the way the secret transit has been performed are now being shown for the very first time. They have been declassified by Bulgaria's Interior Ministry especially for the purposes of the present investigation. Unfortunately, not a paper from the operative archive has been declassified yet.

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