Bulgaria gripped by mysterious deaths of six people in mountains | Bulgaria
Dubbed the “Twin Peaks” of Bulgaria, it is a horrific saga about the mysterious deaths of six people in the middle of the mountains that grip the Eastern European country.
Zahari Vaskov, director of the national police headquarters, said at a press conference on Monday that the deaths were “an incomparable case in our country.”
Chief Prosecutor Borislav Sarafov made his own decision, perhaps in keeping with an investigation shrouded in sensational conspiracies, contradictory statements and feverish speculation. “Life has given us more shocking details here than the TV series Twin Peaks,” he told local media, referring to the 1990s US television drama.
The case began in early February, when three men, ages 45, 49 and 51, were found dead in the charred remains of a cabin near the Petrohan pass, a mountain pass connecting the state of Sofia with the northwestern state of Montana.
All three had gunshot wounds to their heads, which forensic experts say were self-inflicted, either directly or at close range. It was stated that the DNA traces detected on the firearms belonged only to the deceased men.
Then on Sunday, police found the bodies of three more people, two men aged 51 and 22, and a 15-year-old boy, in a caravan in the Okolchitsa Peak area, about 100 km north of the capital Sofia. The trio was pursued by law enforcement because investigators suspected they were connected to the deaths at the Petrohan Pass.
Agence France-Presse reported that the prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday: “Based on autopsy data [latter] “Three bodies, it looks like two murders and a suicide probably occurred in a row.”
According to police, five of those killed were members of the National Protected Areas Control Agency, a non-governmental organization for nature conservation that uses the Petrohan transit lodge as its headquarters and also hosts rural holiday camps for young people.
Some accounts describe its members as “forest rangers” who for years patrolled the area near the border with Serbia and assisted border police. Law enforcement officials, meanwhile, said the men were involved in Tibetan Buddhism and quoted a member’s relative as speaking of “extraordinary psychological instability” within the group.
Relatives of the deceased said they must have been killed because they witnessed criminal activity around the Bulgaria-Serbian border, where human trafficking and illegal logging activities are not uncommon.
Ralitsa Asenova, the mother of one of the victims in the caravan, denied reports of tension within the group. “They obviously witnessed something. In my opinion, this was a professionally committed murder,” he said in an interview with Bulgarian television channel Nova.
Because details are scarce, the lack of official information has often led to unfounded speculations spreading online, causing Bulgarians to lose confidence in their institutions and authorities. The country has no government and is headed for its eighth parliamentary election in five years.
Former president Rumen Radev called the incident “a political shock and a sign of the state of the country”, according to his press office. Radev, who resigned as president last month after nine years in office, expressed his condolences to the families of the dead and called on authorities to resolve the incident.
“I will not comment on this tragedy, which the authorities must investigate. The reasons for these murders must be clarified as soon as possible because the public is waiting for answers,” he said.
A 2024 survey found that 70 percent of Bulgarians believe in conspiracy theories, while 37 percent err on the side of misinformation; So much so that the authors of the study by the Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) and the Bulgarian-Romanian Digital Media Observatory said that Bulgaria was living in a “post-truth” situation.
