Hundreds of relatives and acquaintances of Aleksey Petrov gathered for his burial in the cemetery of the capital’s “Boyana” district.
The pilgrimage was attended by popular personalities, including the former Deputy City Prosecutor of Sofia Roman Vasilev, Petrov’s lawyer in the “Octopus” case Ina Lulcheva and her colleague Lachezar Takov, businessman Plamen Bobokov and Olympic karate champion Ivet Goranova.
High-ranking employees of the Lev Ins insurance company, which was founded by Petrov, also attended the funeral. There were also the economists Nikola Filipov and Vladimir Sirkarov, the political scientist Stoycho Stoychev, the “white hacker” Kristiyan Boykov (the main defendant in the case of the draining of the NRA data), who now works for “Lev ins”, Vanya Chervenkova, against whom there was some time ago attempt, Alexander Paunov from BSP and the chairman of the Union for Economic Initiative Kuzman Iliev.
Alexey Petrov’s brother – Ognyan, as well as Marcello Jotolov, a defendant with him in the “Octopus” case, came first to the funeral of the former beret together with Petrov’s mother – Dilyana, reports “24 Chasa”.
Yavor Kolev also came to the funeral, who was the head of the unit for combating cybercrimes in the GDBOP, but after leaving the Ministry of the Interior, he started working for “Lev ins”.
During the funeral, security was provided by private towns and a police patrol, and the media were not allowed on the territory of the cemetery park. Among the mourners were also people with armed personal guards. Hundreds of wreaths were laid, among them by fellow graduates of the murdered by the militia school in Pazardzhik, which once bore the name of Felix Dzerzhinsky, considered the founder of the Soviet secret services. Inscribed on the wreath was part of his quote, “(A Chekist is a man with) a cool mind, a warm heart, and clean hands.”
Who was Alexei Petrov?
At the age of 61, Alexey Petrov, also known as Traktor, was shot in broad daylight on August 16 at the foot of Vitosha near Sofia. The news brought many back to the earlier years of the transition, when gangs, mutineer wars, contract killings and near-daily gunfights were commonplace.
Petrov is a former beret, a former adviser in DANS, close to the former chief prosecutor Nikola Filchev, a former defendant and subsequently fully acquitted as the leader of the criminal group for racketeering and extortion “Octopod”, the founder of the insurance company “Lev ins” and its informal leader and until today, executive director of the employer organization Union for Economic Initiative, docent and teacher of “National Security”.
Perceived as a key figure in the power business, Petrov was also a power broker, with access to top politicians (such as former Prime Minister Boyko Borisov) and cops. According to people in the know, he had a say in the composition and decisions of the financial regulators on which his business depends.
So far, Alexey Petrov had survived two publicly known assassination attempts against him
Alexey Petrov was born in the Teteven village of Gradezhnitsa in 1962. He graduated from the militia school in Pazardzhik and then joined the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was a commander in the Special Counter-Terrorism Squad. It passes for one of the most prominent berets. In 1985, he participated in the capture of a terrorist at the Central Station in Sofia. He is described as a determined and strong character who always pursues his goals.
He was also a full-time employee of State Security, as well as an undercover counterintelligence agent.
Petrov was appointed as the organizer of the infamous meeting in 2008 between the then Minister of the Interior Rumen Petkov and the former Berets and accused of racketeering Plamen Galev and Angel Hristov from Dupnitsa. A little later, Petrov was officially appointed as an adviser to Petko Sertov in the newly formed DANS, but even after leaving the agency he remained an influential figure in it.
In 2010, Alexey Petrov was arrested in one of the loudest anti-mafia police operations of the then GERB government under the name “Octopus”. He was accused of being the leader of the “Octopus” criminal group, engaged in racketeering and extortion. This was the biggest case initiated by the Ministry of the Interior of Tsvetan Tsvetanov during the first government of Boyko Borisov. Shortly after the arrest, Petrov himself announced that he helped finance GERB “both directly and indirectly” through Lev Corporation. In response, GERB decided to return a BGN 1,000 donation to a company close to Alexey Petrov.
A decade later, however, Petrov was finally acquitted in court due to lack of sufficient evidence, and in 2021, the prosecution refused to protest the decision and it came into force. Subsequently, the prosecutor’s office and the Ministry of the Interior were sentenced to pay more than BGN 43 million to the Lev Ins insurance company founded by Petrov because of seized equipment and sealed offices of the company and non-property damages during “Octopus”.
