Two citizens of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) have been shot dead on the Bulgarian-Turkish border while during the communist era, the commission on the declassification of the archives of the communist-era secret services' said on April 4 2008.

Commission member Ekaterina Boncheva, as quoted by mediapool.bg, said that the Interior Ministry's archives had recorded only two killings that happened in 1974 and in 1988. She said that the number of victims was probably higher than the ministry's records said, because the commission found an internal order dating 1975 that asked for records to be destroyed.

The order was a breach of the ministry's regulations, Boncheva said. The commission is yet to go through the archives of National Intelligence Service and Bulgarian Army. The commission found records for 415 arrests of foreign nationals on Bulgarian borders with Turkey and Greece.

Besides GDR citizens, Poles and Hungarians were also among the arrested.  Most of the arrested were sent back to their home countries, but in some of the cases there no information regarding their fate.

“For example, in September 1974 when one of the two killings happened, a total of 22 foreigners were arrested for trying to cross the border. This is the only information in the file from that month, nothing more,” Boncheva said. An interesting fact noted by the commission was that all communication between Bulgarian secret services and their GDR counterparts was done exclusively in Russian.

Under communism, Bulgaria was often used by GDR citizens as bridge country in their attempts to escape to western Europe, because it shared borders with Nato members Greece and Turkey.

GDR and other central European citizens were able to come to Bulgaria as tourists and could easily reach the border. For years, rumours circulating in Bulgaria suggested that the number of GDR citizens killed by Bulgaria's border patrols was in double digits, if not more.

It was not until relatives of the victims in Germany started asking questions about their loved ones that the issue was brought to the agenda of Bulgarian society.

According to commission member Valeri Katsounov, a communist-era border guard would get 20 days of leave as a reward for capturing fugitives. If the guard has used his firearm during the arrest, he would get a wrist watch as well, he said, as quoted by mediapool.bg.