The murdered Bulgarian football club president, Yuriy Galev was born June 3, 1963, in the Beli Iskar village close to Sofia. Back in his youth he served in the Chavdar Sports School of the Bulgarian People’s Army where he was a wrestler and dubbed one of the “Olympic Hopes” team.

This is where he first met Vasil Iliev and Georgi Iliev, later to become the legendary leaders of the most powerful Bulgarian mafia group in the early 1990s known as VIS. After fighting each of the brothers at separate occasions, Galev was in permanent conflict with them. (Vasil Iliev was murdered in 1995, and Georgi Iliev – in 2005, also as a football club president.)

Not unlike many former Bulgarian wrestlers, he later went into the murky security business.

At the time of his death, Yuriy Galev was president of the Rilski Sportist football club from the town of Samokov near Sofia, and municipal councilor in that town from the nationalist party Ataka.

Galev is notorious in Samokov for a number of criminal acts. The latest one was in February when Galev and several of his associates beat two ski lift guards in the Borovets mountain resort near Samokov after the latter refused to let his son ride the lift for free.

In the wake of this incident, the local police arrested four of Galev's men for arson of an office of the Borosport firm, which operates the ski lift.

In 1995, he was arrested after randomly shooting in the Rila hotel in Borovets with an AK-47. The same year Galev took part in shooting in nearby village of Beli Iskar and a mass fight at a disco in north-western town of Montana. Similar acts were committed in 1996 and 1999. Galev has been detained by the police on various charges, but later released.

In February 2009, Galev survived unharmed a similar attempt on his life – his car was shot at with an AK-47 at about the same spot on the road to his home village where he was wounded in June 2010.

After the first attempt on his life in February 2009, Galev said, “Somebody fire a couple of shots, big deal! I am not scared of bullets!”

Galev was founded with five bullets in the stomach and limbs on June 20, 2010; he died on June 30 in hospital of a heart attack.

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