Earlier this week the special services with support from Europol seized in Sofia dozens of illegal immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan. A channel for illegal transfer of migrants from the Middle East to Europe via Bulgaria has been destroyed. Its managers, nationals of Iraq and Syria, were expelled for threatening the national security by transfer of foreigners from risky regions potentially linked to terrorist and extremist activity.

In the meantime, the reputable German newspaper Die Welt sounded the alarm that followers of Islamic State had been moving around Europe holding regular Bulgarian passports obtained from the Bulgarian mafia. Issues are quite troublesome too with the so-called local substrate of illegal migration. Since Islamic State has become widely discussed in world political affairs there have been neither reports of Bulgarians members of it, nor cells based in this country. One way or another though the feeling of a terrorist organization’s presence is real and has nurtured well-grounded fears.

This is made clear in a few recent developments. First, the Court of Appeal in Plovdiv has extended the sentence of one of the defendants in the so-called Imam Trial in which charges were brought against 14 individuals for preaching radical Islam and dissemination of Islamic State ideas. Next, the Prosecutor’s Office in Pazardjik brought charges against 14 individuals of preaching hatred on religious grounds expressed as religious intolerance to non-practitioners and to those unconfessed in the Salafi denomination of Islam, and of propagating war via promoting the ideas of the Islamic State. There is zero proof for Islamic State cells in Bulgaria but there is suspicion of their existence in that same city, Pazardjik. There Roma Gypsies freely chant slogans in Arabic and proudly post own photos with attributes characteristic of that terrorist organization which uses West European followers in the Middle East, on the one hand,while at the same time infiltrates terrorists there. This organization has a network of adherents and continues to recruit fighters from countries neighboring on Bulgaria such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia.

To cut a long story short, it is quite obvious that the problems of illegal migration in Bulgaria are getting worse. During its seasonal peak in the summer migration pressure by land from Turkey has been growing parallel to pressure by sea over Greece and Italy. This spells greater responsibilities for the authorities due to both external and domestic factors.

English Daniela Konstantinova