site.btaUPDATED Prosecution Service Is Probing PM, Ministers, Interior Ministry Secretary General - Gurov

The prosecution service has opened a probe against the Prime Minister, government ministers and the Interior Ministry Secretary General. That was announced by caretaker Prime Minister Andrey Gurov in a Facebook post.

He said the prosecutors "have acted on tipoffs from the gutter press" and questioned who had ordered the probes, why they are undertaken just before elections and what the real purpose is. "While the government is working on alerts from citizens, the prosecution service is acting on tipoffs from the bludgeons," he said.

News about the probes comes with only one full day left until the April 19 snap parliamentary elections.

According to Gurov, the past month have shown "two Bulgarias: one where votes are bought and people are not free, and another where people submit alerts and refuse to participate in such practices". He underscored the increased number of alerts for election-related offences - 250% more than the last elections.

The Prime Minister went on to catalogue measures by his Cabinet to ensure fair elections and said that 360 people have been remanded for election violations and some 40 people with immunity have been referred to the prosecution service on suspicion of vote buying: "people who are or want to be members of Parliament and who want to be writing Bulgaria's laws". Also, police have seized close to one and a half million euro designated for vote buying, he added.

As he said that he and members of his team are being investigated by the prosecution service, he said: "We are not afraid and we stand upright. We want to give you courage to stand upright as well. The caretaker Cabinet came with a mission to ensure fair elections and nothing will stop us from accomplishing this mission," he said in what sounded like his last pre-election address to Bulgarians. 

Approached for comment, the prosecution service told Nova TV that it is obliged by law to check all alerts submitted to it. According to Nova's information, the probe against the caretaker Prime Minister is over the ten-year bilateral security agreement he signed with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv on March 30.

Later in the day, Interior Ministry's acting Secretary General Georgi Kandev wrote on Facebook that he is being checked by the prosecution service and has been questioned but that does not scare him. “Because the assessment of our work is not written by those peddling ballots. It is written by the people. By you,” wrote Kandev. He noted in his post that he sleeps soundly because he knows that his actions have been and continue to be solely in the interest of Bulgarian citizens.

Caretaker Justice Minister Andrey Yankulov too wrote on Facebook that he is not concerned by the probes. "It is only natural for the prosecution service to have the State Agency for National Security investigate me based on Blik’s fabricated stories, rather than investigating itself for throwing out an investigation into the death of a pedestrian on a crosswalk - based on security camera footage - after boasting about how uncompromising it is in the fight against road accidents. I have no concerns whatsoever about these probes. However, it seems to me that the leadership of the prosecution service has serious concerns about the things they have done and continue to do," wrote the Justice Minister.