The Director of Bulgaria's National Statistics Institute (NSI), Mariana Kotseva, fired the head of the "Demographic and Social Statistics" Directorate, a department head within the latter and an expert.

The news was announced by NSI in a letter sent to the media Thursday, explaining the dismissals, along with disciplinary sanctions imposed on two other employees from the Directorate, were made in connection with the blunder with the online census questionnaire. The said questionnaire gave as possible answers for ethnic groups: Bulgarian, Turkish, Roma, and a 4th option listing ethnicities such as Bulgarian-Muslim, Macedonian, African-American, among others.

NSI further inform about the results of the probe in the matter, ordered by Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, over the ethnic tensions it stirred in the country.

The probe proved the categories and the online questionnaire for the trial census have been a single-handed decision of an expert and a department head and have been in violation of the approved census map.

The probe further discovered that the employees failed to coordinate their work with supervisors along with insufficient and ineffective monitoring and control on the part of the latter. The check, however, did not establish any premeditated actions aiming a creating ethnic tensions.

In the letter, the NSI management stresses the Institute does not have the authority to create or eliminate ethnic groups and adheres to respecting the rights of self-determination of all citizens.

For the real census next year the online questionnaire would be identical to the paper one, NSI assure.

On Tuesday, the Bulgarian cabinet approved the resignations of two NSI Deputy Directors - Mustafa Zinal Hasan and Galina Mitkova Goycheva-Lukarska in connection with the same issue.

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