A dangerous criminal with a gun was apprehended near the Hilton Sofia last Thursday, on the eve of the summit of NATO candidate countries, announced the chief secretary of the Ministry of the Interior Boyko Borisov on Saturday.

Svetlozar Loukanov, 29, was arrested by policemen from the fourth police department at 8:20pm on October 4 while walking along Tsar Assen Street, about 300m from the Hilton. According to a press release from the Ministry of the Interior, he was looking around suspiciously, with his hand tucked under his jacket.

Police officers Svetoslav Kiuchukov and Kaloyan Alexandrov, both 27, were patrolling nearby. They stopped the suspicious man for a check and managed to safely disarm him when he pulled out a gun, explained the press release. When reinforcements arrived, Loukanov resisted violently and broke the arm of one of the policemen trying to detain him.

During a press conference on Saturday, Borisov said that Loukanov was carrying a Scorpio automatic gun with blotted out registration numbers, a silencer, and two clips, each containing 20 cartridges. The skin of his fingers was stripped so that he would leave no fingerprints.

According to information from foreign special services, four heads of state were endangered during their stay in Bulgaria, one in particular, said Borisov, who would not reveal any names. However, of those attending the summit, security was tightest around Macedonian President Boris Traikovski.

General Dimitar Vladimirov, head of the National Guard Service, said that of the nine presidents who were scheduled to stay at the Hilton, only eight did so, and one was moved elsewhere. According to local media, this president was Traikovski, who spent the night in another hotel, known to only a few officers from the National Guard Service and the president's personal guards.

The media also reported that Traikovski arrived last for the summit, in a car instead of by plane as was intended, and that his motorcades drove along "deceiving routes." He left Bulgaria with three helicopters so that no one would know which of the three he was in.

Although the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior did not link the arrest of the armed man to the summit, Macedonian newspapers covered the incident extensively and wrote that Loukanov was planning an assassination of Traikovski.

The Macedonian daily Dnevnik quoted the Macedonian president's national security adviser Nikola Dimitrov, who said that cooperation with the Bulgarian security services was excellent. Also pleased by their work was Bob Parker, director of the National Association of Technical Officers in the U.S. and security consultant to the Ministry of the Interior.

According to a court decision on Monday, Loukanov was charged with illegal gun ownership, resisting arrest and causing minor physical damage. A search of his apartment in the Mladost district in Sofia uncovered another clip with 19 cartridges and a second silencer for the Scorpio gun.

Loukanov was arrested several times in 1997 and charged with kidnapping and blackmail, said the Ministry press release. On Saturday bTV reported that he was involved in the murder of three police officers in the Lyulin district five years ago.

Loukanov is unmarried, unemployed, and has a secondary school education.