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• The list also includes Bulgarian ambassador to Romania, Valentin Radomirski
Bulgarian prime-minister Boiko Borisov wants to dismiss all the diplomats that cooperated with the former Secret Service.
The head of the Government of Sofia made this announcement after a Bulgarian Special Commission revealed on Tuesday that almost half of the 462 Bulgarian diplomats that were investigated were collaborators and agents of the former Bulgarian political police.
"I think we should dismiss them and I think that my party (ed. note: GERB, which is currently in power) will support me", said Boiko Borisov, according to the website Novinite.com, quoted by Mediafax.
In his plan to reform the Bulgarian diplomacy, prime-minister Boiko Borisov is banking on the support of his governing party - GERB, a center-right faction, whereas most diplomats belong to his rival party, the socialists led by former prime minister Serghei Stanişev.
"If 50% of our ambassadors and consuls were agents, can you imagine what things were like in our country?", Borisov wondered.
The list of diplomats that would be fired if Borisov"s plan were implemented would also include Bulgarian ambassador to Romania, Valentin Radomirski.
Radomirski also figures as a collaborator of the former Bulgarian secret service, according to the publication Sofia Echo.
Ambassador Valentin Radomirski was an advisor to the former prime-minister Sergey Stanishev, leader of the Socialist party, the main rival of GERB, the party of Boiko Borisov. By the time the paper went to the printer, the Bulgarian embassy had not yet released any statement.
Prime Minister Borisov is not on his first attempt to reveal the collaborators of the former Bulgarian political police.
A special commission appointed to reveal the activities of the secret services published a list of 36 journalists that cooperated with the former political police.
Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko Borisov received several death threats. Three plots were made against him, with the last being thwarted by the Bulgarian Special Services.
In July 2010, the members of an organized crime faction were arrested by the authorities in Sofia, being charged with having paid 400,000 Euros to have the Bulgarian prime minister assassinated.
"400,000 is not enough", Boiko Borisov commented at the time.
• Black list of diplomats
According to the Bulgarian press, some of the diplomats that were revealed to have been secret agents include ambassadors, consuls and deputy directors of the diplomatic missions of the UK, Germany, Italy, UN (New York and Geneva), Portugal, Spain, Holland, Turkey, Russia, China, Sweden, Romania, Norway, Japan, Qatar, Kuwait, Syria, Egypt, Bosnia, Greece, Vatican, Slovakia, Albania, Georgia, Armenia and Venezuela.
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• The Zikolov case: former military attaché of the Bulgarian Embassy, accused of espionage
In this way, the Bulgarian embassy in Romania once again becomes the center of attention, after the row of the arrest of Bulgarian spy, Zikolov Petar Marinov on charges of espionage against Romania.
Zikolov was arrested in 2009 by the authorities of Bucharest after the Romanian counterespionage services held him under surveillance for three years.
At the time, the prosecutors produced evidence that Romanian non-commissioned officer Floricel Achim had been selling secret state documents to Zikolov, for almost eight years (starting in 2001), which it had copied using a memory stick from a computer in the office. During the house-search, the investigators found files of the army at the homes of the two defendants.
Zikolov was a military attaché of the Bulgarian embassy of Bucharest between November 1998 and until the first half of 2000. He officially appeared as a businessman in the food business. The Romanian Intelligence Service confirmed that Zikolov was part of a foreign secret service. In turn, the authorities of Sofia claimed that Zikolov was not an employee of any Bulgarian public institution.
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