An organized criminal group of robbers was arrested in the southern city of Plovdiv Friday night, Bulgaria’s Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov announced Sunday.

The criminals were busted as they were trying to rob a currency exchange. The arrested men are Ivan Radkov, aka Ramoto (i.e. “The Shoulder”), Petar Nikolov, aka Pashkata, and Dimitar Batalski, aka Bombata, (i.e. “The Bomb”).

The three men were not armed and did not fight the policemen but tried to run away and one of them was caught with a police dog.

On Saturday, the police have detained seven more gangsters who were also part of the same gang. Two men were busted in Sofia and five – in the northwestern city of Vratsa.

One of the detainees in Vratsa is Toni Kostadinov, the former head of the police department in the town of Byala Slatina who was recently fired after it turned out that several of his subordinates had formed a “private traffic police” constantly blackmailing local people for money.

“According to our information, Toni Kostadinov is the man who gave the gang information about places with lots of money, some of which have already been robbed. His arrest now has prevented his upcoming appointment as a security officer in the Vratsa Regional Court. His impudence is so huge at one point before his birthday, he told the gangsters about a place in the town Miziya and asked them to “make him happy” by robbing it as a birthday present,” Interior Minister Tsvetanov announced.

Last month the gang robbed a firm in the town of Troyan. In August, they robbed a bank branch in Kozloduy where they got BGN 120 000. The group was preparing hits in Blagoevgrad, Haskovo, and Dimitrovgrad.

The police have seized a large amount of special technical devices from the detainees and their homes which were used in robberies of banks and companies. The prosecutors are about to raise charges against them.

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