A prisoner claims to hold the key to one of the most mysterious murders of a lawyer in Bulgaria, committed back in 2000.

The man, identified as Iliya Nikolov, serves a sentence at the prison in the town of Lovech and argues he knows who killed lawyer Nadezhda Georgieva. Before he speaks out however he wants to strike a deal with the prosecutors and get his sentence reduced in exchange.

Georgieva was killed in her home in Sofia, suffering nine blows from a kitchen cleaver on February 28, 2000.

The new and crucial witness will appear in the court room on November 17, when the court saga over the murder, which has stretched over more than a decade already, will resume.

The lack of progress so far has been due to the authorities' failure to bring back to Bulgaria one of the defendants - Dimitrinka Kalajdzhieva, a former prosecutor's secretary, who has run into hiding in Great Britain shortly after the murder.

One of the versions floated so far has been that Nikola Filchev, Bulgaria's controversial and erratic former senior prosecutor, has masterminded the mysterious murder of the lawyer in 2000.

Witnesses claim the lawyer was handed USD 150 000 to give to Filchev as a bribe to make him stop an investigation against the state-owned deep-sea fishing company.

Georgieva, however, did not give Filchev the cash and in a moment of a cyclophrenic crisis he killed her, plunging a kitchen cleaver in her head.