May 22 (BTA) -  All documents related to politicians'
wiretapping, if any such documents exist, must be declassified,
GERB insists.

Toma Bikov of the until recently ruling party told a news
briefing here on Saturday that "names must be named and those to
 blame must be held accountable if anything against the law had
been done, and all this must be referred to the competent
authorities."

The comments follow a scandal that flared up on Thursday, when
Democratic Bulgaria co-chairman and Democrats for Strong
Bulgaria (DSB) leader Atanas Atanassov told the Bulgarian
Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) that,
according to a completely genuine information from a reliable
source, 32 senior opposition politicians, including
top-of-the-list candidates, had been wiretapped around the April
 4 parliamentary elections.

Atanassov specified that the opposition figures' communications
had been intercepted by the Interior Ministry's Internal
Security Directorate, the Counterterrorism Unit of the State
Agency for National Security (SANS) and the Counterterrorism
Unit of the Chief Directorate for Combating Organized Crime
(CDCOC). The DSB leader called on caretaker Interior Minister
Boyko Rashkov to conduct a probe and shed light on the scandal,
which Atanassov compared to Watergate.

Later in the day, Rashkov confirmed to BTA that the SANS and the
 State Agency Technical Operations had indeed wiretapped
politicians.   

On Saturday, Bikov said that the alleged wiretapping will be
forgotten once the July 11 early parliamentary elections are
over because it is part of the election campaign. "The Interior
Minister, along with the caretaker cabinet, are involved in the
election campaign. This is totally inadmissible and the
Constitution does not provide for such a role for a caretaker
cabinet," the ex-GERB MP said. He noted that his party is
"shocked by the fact that the Prime Minister claims that
politicians had been wiretapped because he heard it on the media
 which circulated Atanassov's statements".

GERB Deputy Chairman Daniel Mitov argued that "President Radev
and Interior Minister Rashkov cannot forgive the services for
detecting and cracking the Russian spy network". "In our
assessment, the services are attacked because the caretaker
cabinet is gradually and quite obviously turning into President
Radev's campaign committee and is working for his re-election,"
Mitov said.

He pointed out that in Bulgaria, a law requires that the
deployment of special intelligence means should be authorized by
 the court and called for "everything to be declassified, the
court should publish the statistics about the authorized
deployment of special intelligence means and the truth should be
 clarified".

Approached by reporters later in the day, President Rumen Radev
commented that every alert about wiretapping must be checked.
"The point is that those same people who organize and carry out
the wiretapping now must probe themselves. Hence the need of
some inevitable personnel changes," the head of State explained.

Regarding GERB's allegation that the attack against the security
 services is prompted by the cracked Russian spy network, Radev
said: "The government of those same critics, which was in charge
 of the arrangements and control for classified information
protection, looked on when as many as five Bulgarian officers,
whom they have cleared for access, were 'breached' by foreign
services," the President pointed out.

He was apparently referring to the latest spy scandal, in March
2021, when six Bulgarian military intelligence officers, both on
 active duty and former ones, were detained on suspicion of
passing classified information to Russia.

Radev added that he could spend 20 minutes listing examples of
the services' inaction under the Boyko Borissov Government.

On Friday, the Sofia City Prosecution Office (SCPO) said that,
acting on its own initiative, it had assigned the National
Bureau for Control over Special Intelligence Means to probe the
Interior Ministry Internal Security Directorate, CDCOC and SANS
and establish whether any violations had been committed in the
use of special intelligence means. The SCPO said the public will
 be informed of the findings of the probe. RI/LG