BULGARIA: Bulgarian police announced a crackdown on the country's rampant Mafia yesterday, after a sniper killed a reputed crime boss with a single bullet through the heart.
At his nightclub in a busy Black Sea resort, Georgi Iliev was celebrating the success of his football club, Lokomotiv Plovdiv, in qualifying for the Uefa Cup when he was felled by a marksman's bullet that picked him out among his many bodyguards.
Iliev (39), who served an 11-year jail term for rape, inherited an opaque business empire from his brother, who was shot dead a decade ago.
Just before his death late on Thursday night, Iliev had seen his Lokomotiv Plovdiv team beat OFK Belgrade 1-0 to progress to the lucrative Uefa Cup, and he was expecting the players to celebrate with him at the club where he died.
Police in the resort of Sunny Beach said he was shot while talking on the telephone on the terrace of his nightclub. They were reviewing CCTV footage and interviewing dozens of witnesses yesterday.
"There is a connection between the latest murders in [ the Bulgarian capital] Sofia and the shooting of Georgi Iliev at the Sunny Beach resort last night," said Gen Krasimir Petrov, a local police chief, in reference to last month's killing of another alleged Mafia boss, Anton Miltenov, and two bodyguards in a packed cafe.
Gen Petrov also suggested a possible link between Iliev's murder and a bombing on the Black Sea coast two months ago that killed the wife and baby daughter of another local businessman.
Interior minister Roumen Petkov said the security services would immediately intensify nationwide operations against suspected crime figures, and conduct checks into the tax, customs and banking records of people with possible Mafia links.
Dozens of suspected criminals have succumbed to contract "hits" in recent years, with gunmen dressing up as policemen and even priests to get close to their target. Assassins have also blown up several cars and a glass-walled elevator to make a kill.
Security analysts say the spectacular "turf wars" between crime groups are only the most obvious sign of the corruption that pervades all levels of Bulgarian society, including the police force, law courts and banking system.
The EU has warned Sofia that it must take swift and decisive action to combat organised crime, if its bid to join the bloc in 2007 is not to be postponed.