A few days ago at about 10.30am I went to the newsstand next my house to buy my favourite daily. "Sorry, I have sold it out", the lady said to my astonishment. When I asked why, she simply said: "You know its because of all the kidnappings lately". Her answer made me think when was the last time people rushed to newsstands to buy newspapers. As far as I remember it was about this time last year when the five Bulgarian medics and the Palestinian doctor came back after nine years of tortures spent in Libyan jail.
Unlike the happy occasion last year, this time people seem more interested in the fact that there are other people who can hijack anyone they want, keep him somewhere for as long as they like, abuse him and his family, ask for ransom money and get away with it and perhaps plan their next hit.
There have been several cases of kindappings in Bulgaria in the past 10 years with the targets being businessmen or their children. As one could imagine none of these cases have been solved, no one has been arrested and, as it often happens in life, when you do something and you get away with it, you are ready to do it again.
The latest kidnapping of the now former president of Litex Lovech football club Angel Bonchev is the recent example for that.
Every time when such a kidnapping happens, the public usually hears the smart words of some police expert who says something of the kind "the kidnapping has been organised very professionaly by well trained people who know their business". An interesting question arises from such an "expert comment". If kidnappers are so well trained that they can beat the entire police force of Bulgaria it is not that difficult to suggest where kidnappers have actually got their training from.
It is common knowledge that after the fall of the Berlin wall, a big number of people from the Bulgarian special police forces known as "the bareti" left them and entered the business sector as hired security guards and God knows what else. They were trained really well, especially in how to organise special operations, release hostages, organise ambushes, etc. So one can easily assume that since, for example, Bonchev's kidnappers were so sophisticated and thechnically advanced to silence all police frequencies, as police officers themselves later said, they must have be trained in similar conditions to the current policemen on duty.
After all, Bulgaria is a small country and there aren't that many people who will try to kidnap a popular person such as Bonchev in broad daylight, keep him somewhere for 50 days and fool a special police operation. It is just a vague idea, but probably policemen could check the dossiers of all the people who have served in the "bareti" force, check their whereabouts and follow the lead. Who knows, maybe the Interior Ministry was smart enough to keep all former "bareti" members on their watchlist trough the years just in case, as one might assume.
If nothing else, former "bareti" members could at least help the investigation to some extent because such people usually keep contact with one another. As for the comments that Bonchev's kidnappers could be citizens of former Yugoslav countries who have beem left without a job after the end of the war, there is only one answer: it is Interior Ministry's job to keep track of who enters the country and their whereabouts. After all, Bulgaria is now the EU's border and we all keep hearing about how many millions of EU money have been invested in the country's border control system exactly for this reason.
If all this does not help, then the society has only one option: to assume that there is a serious crack in Interior Ministry's system that allows kidnappers to be always a step ahead of investigators. Corrupt police officers is not something unheard in the rest of the world, but with Bulgarian police' constant lack of success in such cases, one starts to suspect that the number of corrupt policemen in Bulgaria is overwhelmingly more than in other countries. All this feeling of helplessness has already resulted in a public frenzy. A group of companies from Varna have just asked the Commercial Register to stop publishing detail information about the ownership of the companies because it could serve as a catalog for kidnappers when selecting potential victims. The newspapers are already full of stories how the business of providing security services and armoured vehicles is booming as a direct consequence of the Bonchev kidnapping.
It is a simple case of supply and demand, one might say.
