About 3-4 terabytes of data from the phones of those involved in the case are still out of reach for investigators, said criminal psychologist Rosen Yordanov, an expert witness who worked on the psychological assessment. The prosecutor's office has not confirmed that volume.
Yordanov said he will not step down from the case, despite a request from relatives of the dead. He said there is no reason for him to do so.
The six died in two linked criminal episodes: near the Petrohan mountain lodge and below Okolchitsa peak. On 10 February the prosecutor's office said the evidence on the three people in a camper van below Okolchitsa pointed to two likely murders and one suicide. The Petrohan and Okolchitsa cases were later merged into one.
Yordanov explained that some of the phones were reset to factory settings before the tragedy, which makes it harder to recover the data. Other devices the participants had been in contact with made it possible to recover some of the photos and messages. Many of the conversations took place on the Signal app.
Not everything can be pulled from the devices themselves, because some of the data is stored only in cloud services. So investigators are asking for help from agencies and companies abroad. The prosecutor's office confirmed back in February that it had sent a request to a US partner agency and to Europol. Sofia District Prosecutor's Office said then that the request for international help goes through Eurojust.
In March, experts were asked to prepare a combined psychological, psychiatric, sexological and theological assessment. The team has four experts: psychologists, a psychiatrist and a theologian. According to Yordanov, he and his colleague Lyubka Hristova did most of the work. The assessment runs to 157 pages and was submitted at the end of August. It is meant to establish how the participants lived, how they related to each other and what their possible motives were.
Yordanov said the team worked for six and a half months. The experts went through documents, audio files, video recordings and a large body of academic literature, and the other experts compared the workload to a doctoral thesis.
A separate combined expert report on the deaths of the three people below Okolchitsa was also ready at the end of August. It covers medical, ballistic, physical-chemical and technical findings, and 8 specialists worked on it. Some of these analyses were submitted in August. The conclusion on the deaths of the three people near the lodge is still awaited. Yordanov said the main ballistic reports are ready, but one is delayed because a last projectile was found.
The prosecutor's office said the expert reports are large and complex. Their conclusions will be weighed together with all the other evidence: crime scene inspections, witness interviews, physical evidence and the other expert reports.
At a public briefing, relatives of the participants asked for some of the experts to be removed and challenged some of the conclusions. Yordanov said the claims of bias appeared only after the conclusions were presented, out of disagreement with them.
Yordanov thinks the briefing was badly organised, with an atmosphere like a football crowd and attempts to suggest chaos and lack of professionalism. He said journalists partly joined in the tension, and that some people linked to the case react in an overly defensive and hostile way.
Other people owe answers, including some of the participants' relatives and close circle, Yordanov said. He listed the questions: why certain decisions were made, who supported the group and what role their helpers played.
There is a request to exhume one of the dead. The decision is not Yordanov's, but he strongly disagrees with the pressure around the family. He said relatives of real victims and of alleged perpetrators have been pulled into one public front, and this creates confusion.
Yordanov also said he has a photo of a message between a member of the group and Sofia mayor Vasil Terziev. In his reading, it talks about ideas for protecting Vitosha mountain and a sum of about €153.39 thousand (300 thousand leva) (about €153 thousand). He does not know exactly when the exchange took place, nor for certain which phone the photo came from. The claim has not been confirmed by publicly available official materials. There are no reports of any charges against Terziev.
The donations the prosecutor's office has spoken of are a separate line of inquiry. In March it said that, according to witness testimony, the group's members received nearly €153.39 thousand (300 thousand leva) (nearly €153 thousand) and a drone over the past 3-4 years. The largest donation is €128.33 thousand (251 thousand leva) (about €128 thousand) and went to one of the members. The prosecutor's office also said then that the six were centred on the lodge, and that it is checking their ties with officials and who supported them.