A Mule to the Slaughter?

According to the Bulgarian online news site Bivol.be, the bus bomber who killed himself and six other people at the Burgas airport on July 18 was acting as a “mule” for others, and was unaware that his luggage was to be detonated remotely.

Bivol has published photos of the young man’s head, and say that he had blue eyes and Caucasian features. The photos may be disturbing to sensitive readers, so I’ve left them out of the excerpts below. Anyone who wants to see them may visit the original article.

Exclusive in Bivol: Headshots of the Burgas Bus Bomber

Bivol is publishing exclusive photos of the head of the person, who was announced as the suicide assailant by the Bulgarian authorities. A young, blue-eyed man with perfectly Caucasoid features, high forehead and thick black hair can be seen on the snapshots.

The photos are obviously manipulated with software, which had added rasterization to the image and retouching of the most dreadful marks of the explosion.

Bivol wrote earlier that the “kamikadze” version (the right word is “shahid” — an Arabic word, which means “martyr” or “witness”) given by the internal minister Cvetanov didn’t endure consequently and it is more likely that the young man had been used as a mule without knowing that he is going to be blasted. The perpetrators of the assault interrupted the connection to them and to the organizers by blasting the man by remote sensing methods.

This version was confirmed by the witness Gilat Kulangia, who had seen the man taking out suitcases from the rack of the bus and instead putting in his backpack. Then a scandal started between her husband and another tourist and after a few seconds the explosion echoed.

In an interview for Darik radio the brigadier Nitzan Nuriel, former head of the Office for Combating Terrorism to the Israeli National Security Council, said yesterday:

“He has had the mission to put the bags with the explosive in the bus, because if he had the right to decide alone whether to blow himself up, he then should have done it so that there are more victims and damages.”

Nuriel also explained that the Israeli services have experience with such assaults when the organizers choose people, who don’t know that they are going to die.

The suicide assault version was disseminated in the parliament today and the security services couldn’t do anything in order to prevent it.

The statements of the authorities about where the assailant came in Bulgaria were highly controversial. The prime minister Boiko Borisov claimed that the assailant came in Bulgaria from a country-member of the Schengen area and the internal minister Cvetan Cvetanov said that there is no evidence whether the person was in the territory of the European Union. The only countries fitting both conditions are Switzerland and Norway, but leaks from the investigation in Bulgarian media mentioned Belgium, or Luxemburg.

Bivol also wrote that the concessionaire of Burgas airport, who takes care of the security of the inner perimeter of the airport, is connected to the TIM group from Varna. The airport authorities in Burgas were sharply criticized by an Israeli security expert according to whom the assault was not fated:

“It’s a matter of fact that thousands of people from Israel visit Bulgaria and the whole world knows that these people are a target and a purpose for terrorists. We all know how many times the Israeli authorities had received information about prepared assaults which they have prevented. We also know very well that even the best intelligence could not detect each prepared assault. And because of this the most simple thing the security services could do at the airport was to have well-trained agents who could do one and only thing — to walk around the terminal and to look for suspicious persons, who also stroll indolently and have the most different behavior amongst all the other passengers. But the services didn’t do it.”

Hat tip: RR.