Ammunition warehouses of the Bulgarian arms company EMKO exploded early on Sunday near Karnobat, a few days after Bulgaria announced it would join the coalition to supply shells to Ukraine.
The warehouses that exploded Sunday were targeted a year ago in an instance of sabotage.
They are owned by one of the most famous Bulgarian arms manufacturers and traders, Emilian Gebrev, who, eight years ago, was the victim of an assassination attempt with a substance similar to Novichok, for which the Bulgarian prosecutor’s office accused Russian military intelligence agents.
“This is an inexplicable strong fire at midnight. The most important thing is that no one got hurt. We cannot know what happened; we still do not know what caused the explosions last year, let alone now after a few hours,” Gebrev told bTV, adding the warehouses contained materials for the manufacture of defence products.
Representatives of the company EMKO said the explosion was, like last time, the result of sabotage as there was nothing in the warehouses that could spontaneously explode.
Bulgaria is one of the largest producers of Soviet-standard ammunition, and in the past year and a half, has exported more than $2 billion worth of weapons to Ukraine, but only through intermediaries.
The pro-Russian forces in the Bulgarian government and President Rumen Radev are against the export of arms to Ukraine, arguing it constitutes Bulgaria’s direct intervention in the war.
Despite this, the business of Bulgarian companies was going well with weapons being exported with the help of American, Polish and Romanian intermediaries.
The prosecutor’s office in Sofia announced last year that it suspects Russia of several incidents at Bulgarian arms factories over the past decade. Before the war in Ukraine started, large quantities of Bulgarian weapons were found in Syria.
The first explosion investigated by the Bulgarian prosecutor’s office was at the weapons factory of EMKO in the village of Lovnidol in 2011, when a significant amount of ammunition was intended for export to Georgia.
The second investigated case dates back to 2015, when a Sopot State Arms Plant warehouse, where EMKO products were also stored, was blown up. In the same year, another warehouse of the “Sopot” state ammunition plant was destroyed. The fourth questionable case is from 2020, when a warehouse of the state-run “Arsenal” weapons factory was blown up near Muglish.
“In all four cases, no specific reasons were established for the explosions in the warehouses. There were no victims or injuries. It was categorically found that the charges were triggered remotely,” the Bulgarian prosecutor’s office announced at the beginning of the investigation in 2022.
According to an investigation by the Bulgarian office of Radio Free Europe, published in early May, at least nine explosions in Bulgarian military warehouses and factories are linked to the Russian military intelligence GRU.
The international investigative site Bellingcat talks about a long-term targeted and massive operation by the GRU against the Bulgarian arms industry.
“The operation appears to have been initiated shortly after July 2014 when Russian authorities subordinated the disparate Russia-supported militant groups in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine under central control and military supervision of the GRU,” according to one of Bellingcat’s investigations about the explosions in Bulgaria.
“The mission, which appears to have been run by the subversion and sabotage sub-unit of GRU’s Unit 29155, included several contiguous operations, among which were the explosions at the Vrbetice depots, the assassination attempt on Emilian Gebrev, and – with increasing likelihood – at least one of the three explosions at munition depots in Bulgaria in early to mid-2015,” it added.
On Sunday, hours after the incident, the Bulgarian government announced that security at military factories would be tightened.
(Krassen Nikolov | EURACTIV.bg)
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