site.btaMarch 9, 1985: 40 Years since Bulgaria’s Worst Train Bombing

Saturday, March 9, 1985, 9:31 p.m. Shortly after the fast train from Burgas to Sofia emerged from the Bunovo railway station (near Pirdop, Western Bulgaria), a violent explosion ripped through its third carriage, reserved for mothers with children. Three men, two women and two boys (aged 12 and 13) were killed, and another seven adults and two children were severely injured. The first three compartments of the carriage were completely destroyed by the shock wave and fire.

Investigators established that the explosive charge was a time bomb placed in a 10-litre plastic canister left on the luggage rack in one of the compartments. The timer was to trigger the blast while the train would be inside a 3,200-m-long tunnel under the Galabets Ridge, but it was 2 minutes behind schedule and this averted a far deadlier disaster.

First responders were rushed to the scene, and the then interior minister Dimitar Stoyanov and transport minister Vasil Tsanov arrived there, too. The wrecked carriage was detached from the train which continued its journey to the capital city with a six-hour delay.

Another bombing attack took place in Sliven (Southeastern Bulgaria) at 10:02 p.m. that same evening, just 31 minutes after Bunovo. The explosive was hidden in a shopping bag left in the cloakroom of a lobby café at Hotel Sliven. The number of casualties there, all non-fatal, varies by source from 14 to 23.

Who Did It and Why

Detecting the perpetrators took two and a half years. By a stroke of luck, the law enforcers got on the track of Emin Mehmedali (then renamed Elin Madzharov) while probing a failed bombing on the beach of the Black Sea resort of Druzhba (now Sts Constantine and Helena) in late July 1986. The two other members of his group were identified as Aptula Chakar (Altsek Chakarov) and Saafet Redzheb (Sava Georgiev). The three were arrested in August 1987.

It was established that Chakar boarded the train in Burgas, planted the bomb and got off in Sliven, where he prepared the blast at the hotel café. For his part, Mehmedali set off an improvised explosive device in the waiting room of the railway station in Plovdiv (South Central Bulgaria) at 5:29 p.m. on August 30, 1984, injuring 41 people (including two children); one severely wounded woman died five days later. At 6:05 p.m. on August 30, another IED, primed by Chakar, went off in front of the passenger terminal of Varna Airport (on the Black Sea), causing minor injuries to two women. Ammonal, Skalenit, ammonium nitrate and electric detonators fired by a battery with wind-up alarm clocks as a timing mechanism were used in the attacks. The bombs were made by Redzheb.

Mehmedali, Chakar and Redzheb were tried behind closed doors, sentenced to death by shooting on April 25, 1988 and executed in early September 1988. Four accomplices (including Mehmedali’s brother) received prison terms ranging from one to five years. Three of them were exchanged for Bulgarian prisoners held in Turkiye, and one was amnestied by President Zhelyu Zhelev and released in 1990.

The explosions were part of a series of terrorist sabotages and bombing attacks carried out in response to the so-called "Revival Process" – an internationally condemned campaign that reached its height between December 1984 and February 1985, whereby Bulgaria’s communist regime forced not fewer than 850,000 ethnic Turks to adopt Slavic names, limit their religious activity, and refrain from speaking Turkish in public.

Historian Stefan Detchev points out that Bulgarian nationalists have been claiming that these terrorist acts were all but the immediate reason for the brutal harassment of Bulgarian Muslims in late 1984 and early 1985. According to one theory, however, the Bunovo and Sliven bombers themselves were State Security agents, Detchev writes, noting further that interior minister Stoyanov personally directed investigators on where to focus their efforts. Moreover, only two of these attacks (at Varna Airport and at the Plovdiv Railway Station) preceded the peak of the assimilation drive.

A memorial plaque listing the names of the victims of the bombing was placed on the building of the Bunovo Station in 1990. A monument to the tragic event, sculpted by Alexander Haytov, was unveiled near the station in September 2007.

A memorial plaque for the three terrorists was installed on a drinking fountain in the Tranak Village near Burgas (Southeastern Bulgaria) in November 1993. The plaque was inscribed in Turkish and was brought from Turkiye. In 1998 the fountain was demolished by order of the district prosecution office and was restored a year later. A group of Bulgarian nationalists from the Ataka Party wrecked the fountain in 2007, but it reappeared shortly after that. It was completely destroyed in November 2009, when the Supreme Administrative Court ordered its removal. Since then, it was never rebuilt.

Information Blackout

The authorities imposed an information blackout on the Bunovo train bombing, and news about it spread by word of mouth. Two days after the fact, BTA ran the following statement in its domestic news service:

"Railway Mishap

Sofia, March 11 (BTA). An incident involving carriage No. 5 of the fast train No. 326 en route from Burgas to Sofia occurred in the area of the Bunovo station at 21:40 hrs on March 9 this year. Seven people were killed and nine persons were injured. The latter were given medical attention.

A commission of experts is investigating the causes of the mishap."

By express instructions from the agency, the March 12 dailies printed the item at the bottom of an inside page. The headline news of the day was the demise of Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko.

In the following days and weeks, the Yugoslav news agency TANJUG, the Associated Press (AP), United Press International (UPI), Agence France-Presse (AFP), Reuters, the Italian news agency ANSA, BBC and the Voice of America (VOA), among other Western media, relayed the official announcement on the "railway mishap". They noted its delayed release, the scarcity of detail, and the absence of information about causes and culprits.

On March 12, Velichko Peychev commented on the Bulgarian Service of Radio Free Europe (RFE) that by 2 a.m. on March 12, when listeners are generally few and far apart, Radio Sofia broadcast a "pared-down, confused and sparse statement, vaguely worded, bowdlerized the communist way", so as to make it impossible to understand whether what happened to the train near the Bunovo station was a breakdown of a separate carriage, a railway accident or something else. "Following the bombing attacks last year [at the Plovdiv Railway Station and Varna Airport in August 1984] and given the current situation of obvious tensions in the country, where areas populated by Bulgarians of Turkish descent are witnessing events covered up by the authorities, any such 'carriage incident' or 'fast train mishap' acquires some added overtones," RFE pointed out. "Once what happened at the Bunovo station is optically reduced through the prism of censorship, why should a commission of experts investigate the case? The second part of the statement refutes the first one," Peychev argued.

On March 14, AFP said that, according to "sources from well informed quarters in the Bulgarian capital contacted from Paris", there were "persistent rumours" that the railway accident had been caused by a bombing attack. French newspapers Le Monde and Le Figaro also reported this version.

Also on March 14, the VOA quoted Western diplomats in Sofia as saying that there was proof that a bomb had been planted on board the train and that Turks living in Bulgaria may be responsible for the event. "Turkiye emphasizes that the one million Turks resident in Bulgaria are being forced to adopt Bulgarian names," the US radio station said, adding that between 100 and 500 Turks who resisted the Bulgarian government’s pressure to do so had been killed in clashes with police since December.

On March 24, the correspondent’s bureaus of UPI and Reuters in Vienna approached BTA for confirmation of hearsay and "reports from the West" about an alleged deadly bomb explosion in Sliven.

On March 26, Reuters reported that a bomb explosion killed seven and injured nine people on the train from Burgas. The news was credited to Western diplomatic sources who were contacted by telephone from Belgrade. They said that Turkish extremists angered by the authorities' campaign intended to force them to adopt Bulgarian names may have been behind the incident.

BTA translated and aggregated the Western media coverage of the attack in its C-2 and C-3 special confidential bulletins.

Official to-the-point information on the train bombing became available to the general public in Bulgaria on April 26, 1988, when an item headlined "Harsh but Just Punishments for Terrorists" appeared in BTA’s non-confidential Domestic News Bulletin. The report detailed the final sentences delivered by the Supreme Court against the seven defendants a day earlier. The court held that Madzharov, Chakarov and Georgiev had formed a group that set itself the objective of "committing acts of terrorism and sabotage and other serious offences". The report explicitly mentioned the explosions in Plovdiv, Varna and Bunovo, saying that they had caused the death of a total of eight persons and had injured 51 others.