EUROPE > ‘Experienced’ Bulgaria bomber had accomplices: PM - Hurriyet Daily News/AFP
The suicide bomber who killed six people in an attack on Israelis had accomplices and may have entered Bulgaria from Europe’s Schengen passport-free area, Prime Minister Boyko Borisov said Tuesday.
“It might turn out he came from a Schengen member state. This is a lead we are checking at the moment with several other EU partner services,” Borisov said.
He said the bomber and his suspected accomplices behind last Wednesday’s attack at a Black Sea airport which Israel has blamed on Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah were “extremely experienced”.
Five Israelis and a Bulgarian driver were killed when the attacker blew himself up on a bus packed with Israelis at Burga airport, the first attack of its kind on Bulgarian soil.
“From what we can see, they came a month in advance,” Borisov said at a press conference of the alleged bombing team.
“They changed hire car again and again. They stayed in different cities so that they would not be seen together — no camera footage shows more than one person from the ones we are looking for.” “These are extremely experienced people who observed absolute secrecy,” he added after talks with US President Barak Obama’s Assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, John Brennan.
The way the attack was done “there was no stopping it” unless the Bulgarian services had “come by chance upon the explosive while it was being prepared,” he said, suggesting the bomb was most probably made in Bulgaria.
Borisov also said investigators have been unable to match fingerprints or DNA samples taken from the bomber with databases around the world.
“We do not know categorically his identity,” he said, adding however: “We know when he arrived, the presumed flight and where it came from”.
Soon after the bombing, Bulgarian authorities released closed circuit television footage from the airport of a young man in typical tourist gear and long hair whom they believe was the suicide bomber.
Speaking to AFP on Monday, Galina Mileva, the coroner who examined the attacker’s remains, put his age at “between 25 and 30-something” and said the bomber had “fair skin” but could have been of Arab origin. Bulgaria is a member of the European Union but is not part of the borderless Schengen travel area formed by 22 of the 27 EU states plus non-EU Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland.
Information will likely continue to come out in drips and drabs over the coming weeks. So far, the accumulating information appears to point to a professionally planned and performed act of terrorism, rather than to a sudden act by a “lone wolf”. If that is the case, there are only a handful of likely actors behind the atrocity.
It will be interesting to see how the powers that be play this one out with only a few days to go before the start of the Olympic games. My guess is that they will continue to try and obfuscate about who was behind this act of terorism until after the Olympic games have come and gone.