Bulgarian State Railways (BDZ) chief executive Oleg Petkov, along with five more top managers from the company, were fired on March 11 2008, the Cabinet press service said in a statement.
The six managers were fired for not ensuring that passenger safety standards were observed properly, the Cabinet said.
The fired officials are the director of the passenger traffic division Dimitur Petkov and his two deputies, Nikolai Nikolov and Georgi Ivanov, as well as the head of the Sofia department of the passenger traffic arm Hristo Ivanov and the head of the safety and control division of BDZ, Ivan Lalov.
On March 7, Transport Minister Petar Moutafchiev said he planned to sack Petkov after the scheduled question time in Parliament, only to withdraw his words later in the day.
The investigation into the causes of the fire, which killed nine people on February 28, is still underway and is expected to last around two months, Prosecutor-General Boris Velchev said on March 5.
The fire started at night in a couchette carriage, which had 35 people in it at the time, and then spread to a sleeping coach with 27 people. It lasted about 15 minutes but it was enough for nine people to lose their lives in the flames. Investigators are working on three main possible reasons for the fire: terrorist attack, accident and criminal misconduct. So far no one had assumed any kind of responsibility for the incident.
