A former employee of the Burgas police claims that there are doubts that current employees of the Regional Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Burgas are involved in a criminal scheme for registration of luxury stolen cars, which was active until recently. He sent a report about what happened to the editorial staff of Iskra.bg. In his report, Nikolay Nikolov described in detail the entire scheme and the manner in which it operated, as well as the actions and inactions of the police itself in the matter.
Nikolay Nikolov worked for many years in the Regional Directorate of the Ministry of Interior in Burgas and reached the highest level in the „Criminal Police“. He was awarded many times for his service, after which he retired. Even after that, Nikolov continued to receive alerts about various criminal schemes, and he submitted the data from them to active employees in the system. Thanks to this, huge amounts of drugs were discovered and policemen were rewarded.
In the same way, in 2020, the former employee of the Ministry of Interior received a report of a criminal scheme for registration of luxury stolen cars at the Burgas Traffic Police. The cars were worth between 100,000 and 150,000 BGN each. The frame numbers were changed and then with false documents they were registered in the Burgas Traffic Police or in other subdivisions of the Traffic Police in the territory of the country. The cars were registered to indigent or criminally convicted persons.
Subsequently, some of them were exported to Turkey, and from there to countries such as Dubai, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and others, and the rest were fought in our country. The information that Nikolov received was extremely specific, containing names, cars and other data. He handed all of this over to the General Directorate of the National Police in mid-2020.
„The strange fact for me was that no one took any action to detain the cars (they calmly continued to leave the country, despite the fact that accurate data on wanted vehicles was submitted) and to stop the criminal scheme that was operating in the Burgas Traffic Police. Instead, in the following months, according to my assumptions, which were later confirmed to the persons of the criminal scheme and to their patrons from the Ministry of Interior, the information leaked out that I was the person who reported what was happening,„, Nikolay Nikolov explained in his report.
In his report, Nikolov also indicated specific names of senior police officers from Burgas. He claims that in October 2020, a garage was rented by individuals from the criminal contingent, who are engaged in changing car frame numbers. It was there that they hid a stolen Ford Mustang worth over 100,000 BGN.
According to Nikolov, a person from Varna changed the license plate number, after which the car was registered at the Burgas Traffic Police by a person from the criminal contingent. After that, it was left in a paid parking lot. The former policeman claims that during the stay of the car in question, the management of the Regional Office serving this area received operational data and notified Head of the „Criminal Police“ department Kiril Kiryazov and Head of the „Crimes related to motor vehicles“ sector Ivan Zhechev.
„Despite these data and the information that reached them, the heads of the „Criminal Police“ in the Regional Directorate of the Ministry of Interior – Burgas did not take actions to secure the car and check it, set a task to control its export through the border crossing and detain it and a number of other actions , which, if they were really real and honest employees of the Ministry of Interior, they should have taken,„, Nikolov pointed out.
The criminal scheme was stopped not thanks to the discovery of the organized criminal group and the arrest of several persons, but because a new way of checking cars before their registration at the Traffic Police began operating in Burgas – a way that was already in place in other cities of the country. It was thanks to this that the scheme was thwarted. But even though it is no longer active, Nikolay Nikolov has written a letter to Acting Minister of Interior Ivan Demerdzhiev, as well as several before and to Boyko Rashkov. In the letter to Demerdzhiev, he indicated that, in his opinion, there was an umbrella over this criminal scheme.
Iskra.bg will continue to follow the case because, although the scheme for registering stolen cars in Burgas traffic police is no longer working, there are doubts that police officers were somehow involved in it – a fact that is still not has been revealed, and anyone who violates the laws of the Republic of Bulgaria must be punished exactly according to the schedules for this in our legal framework – regardless of whether he is an employee of the Ministry of Interior or an ordinary citizen.
