The man held over the killing of Iliyan Filipov is not a professional hitman, says former national police chief General Vasil Vasilev. He fired one shot, hit his target and walked away, Vasilev says — professional killers, he says, always fire a second shot to make sure.
Vasilev said he knows only what he has read about the suspect and warned against calling him a killer before the evidence is laid out and weighed in court. Police still need to find out whether someone paid him to carry out the killing.
The former police chief compared the case to the murder of Petar Hristov, founder of a security firm, who was shot dead outside his office. That killing too, Vasilev says, involved business interests, an ambush, a single shot and a gunman who got away.
General Vasilev says the motive behind the killings of football bosses lies not in sport but in the underworld — in big money and the fight for influence. He added that such crimes are not a return to the 1990s, but separate episodes in the same struggle for money and power.
Vasilev also pointed to the murder of Multigroup boss Iliya Pavlov, shot dead outside his company's head office on Bulgaria Boulevard in Sofia. Pavlov was killed in winter, after dark, but in a lit spot, while he was on the phone.
The shot was fired from about 60 metres away with a .30-06 Springfield hunting round. The bullet tore through Pavlov's heart and liver. Investigators found the exact spot the shot was fired from: a metal bracket had been fixed low on a tree there. The gun was never found.
Four bodyguards were with Pavlov when he was shot. His security team did not chase the gunman — instead they put their wounded boss in a car and drove him to hospital, where he arrived dead. Two to three hours after the murder, a Russian man was killed, and Vasilev believes he may have been the shooter.
Vasilev said the shot that killed Pavlov was fired by a professional, while private guards tend to show their strength only when carrying coffins — as happened both with Zhoro Iliev and with Iliya Pavlov.
There is no fixed price for a contract killing, he added — it all comes down to haggling. Hits, he said, can cost anywhere from 20 euros to 5 million.
Vasilev called on investigators to keep searching for the weapon and carrying out ballistics tests without political pressure.