A control body has seized the guns, hunting licences and membership cards of a group of hunters from the Primorsko hunting club. The reason: their permits for a group wild boar hunt had been swapped with the paperwork of another group. That second group was due to hunt the next day in a different hunting area. Milen Anastasov, head of the Primorsko hunting club, announced the case in a Facebook post.

Anastasov says the hunters were hunting legally and the mix-up with the documents was not intentional. He says inspectors should have looked at the circumstances before coming down hardest on the whole group. "This is clearly an unintentional administrative mistake," he wrote.

Anastasov says the way the inspectors behaved looked less like checking for safety and more like a deliberate hunt for an excuse to punish someone. He says the club respects inspections and has always cooperated, but expects inspectors to use judgement and act professionally instead of just chalking up another fine. He is also asking that hunters be judged individually, based on the real circumstances. "Hunters are not criminals — they are people following the law and exercising their legal right to hunt," Anastasov said.

It is not clear which control body carried out the check, whether all the hunters were issued official notices, or on what grounds the guns were seized. It is also not known whether the hunters involved plan to appeal.

Group wild boar hunts run on an approved schedule for a set group, date and hunting area. A mismatch between the permit and the actual area can lead to punishment regardless of intent. The rules do not say how to judge an individual hunter's guilt when two groups' documents have been swapped, yet in a group hunt a paperwork error affects every participant at once.

Until now, hunting outside the area listed on a permit has led to fines, bans on hunting and confiscation of weapons. In 2026, the district court in Burgas is hearing a separate, unrelated case against a hunter found with a gun outside the area covered by his group wild boar hunting permit.

The forest land in Primorsko municipality falls under several state forestry and hunting estates. Wild boar are common in the area, and the municipality's environmental protection programme lists them as a key species for hunting.