A radio presenter who wrote a book on Bulgarian gangsters was shot dead in Sofia today, the interior minister said.
Bobi Tsankov was killed in central Sofia in broad daylight, Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov told Focus news agency. Two other men at the site of the shooting were wounded and rushed to hospital, police said.
It was the first such killing since the new government took office in July. The centre-right cabinet is under pressure at home and from the European Union to deliver on its pledge to tame powerful organised crime gangs and punish corrupt officials.
Mr Tsankov (30) had publicly revealed his connections with alleged crime bosses and had published a book on the Bulgarian underworld. In 2006, he was injured by a bomb outside his home.
Last November, he told police he had received death threats shortly before his book's publication, local media reported.
Two years ago, Georgi Stoev, the author of a series of books on the emergence of Bulgaria's underworld in the 1990s, was gunned down in front of a hotel in central Sofia.
There have been more than 150 gangland assassinations since 2001. But despite its campaigns against crime and graft, Bulgaria has failed to show results which may lead to sanctions from Brussels, which cut millions of euros in aid in 2008.
Bulgaria has sent to jail only one crime boss since communism collapsed in 1989 and has so far failed to convict a single senior official of graft.
But the new government of Prime Minister Boiko Borisov has taken a harder line since coming to power.
Last month police struck a rare blow against organised crime by arresting more than 25 suspected kidnappers whose abductions of the rich and famous have blackened the new EU member's image.
Reuters