Supreme Court Confirms Sentence for Teenage Murderer, But With Early Release Possible Soon

The Supreme Court confirmed the sentence of 6 and a half years behind bars the bars, but he has served more than half in custody and at home while he was being investigated and tried

Ioan Matev will be in prison for less than 2 years, and in a few months he will even be able to ask for his early release from prison. He is already there with a decree of the prosecutor’s office, the state prosecution reported.

Matev was finally convicted by the Supreme Court of Cassation exactly 8 years after the murder of Georgi Ignatov. On June 2, 2015, he met the boy in Borisova gradina, probably tried to rob him, stabbed him with a knife and fled the scene. He was detained a year and a half later.

At first instance, Matev was acquitted. However, the Court of Appeal overturned the verdict and found him guilty. He was sentenced to 6 and a half years in prison and a blood fine of BGN 150,000 for the victim’s parents. Now the Supreme Court confirms the punishment. It is low for murder because John was 17 at the time of the crime.

Matev was in custody for three years and two months. This time shall be deducted from the sentence. He was then placed under house arrest for more than a year, with two days counted as one served in prison. Therefore, he has already served more than half of the sentence and has the right to ask the court to release him early on parole.

Until the end, Ioan Matev did not admit his guilt.

On June 2, 2015, 15-year-old Georgi Ignatov was waiting for his girlfriend in the Boris Garden right next to the Vasil Levski stadium metro station in the center of Sofia. Ioan Matev approaches him, who was supposed to be practicing tennis at the nearby courts. According to the investigation, Matev wanted to rob Georgi, but there is no such information in the reasons of the second and third instances of the case. Georgi was killed with a single stab.

After that, Ioan runs away from the crime scene through the bushes towards Dragan Tsankov Blvd. Cameras capture a boy with a backpack leaving the park and running along the sidewalk, away from the bench where Georgi was found dead a little later.

The search for him lasted 17 months. Hundreds of policemen, prosecutors, experts, psychologists are looking for the killer of the 15-year-old boy. In the beginning, there is only bad dashcam footage of a young man running with a backpack. There are no eyewitnesses.

From the little data about the crime, a profile of the perpetrator was drawn up, which later matched that of the detainee. According to him, the killer is a male, Bulgarian, probably under 20 years old, a problematic student with aggressive manifestations, probably coming from a dysfunctional family, slightly infantile and with hostile attitudes, immature and with problems in social contacts.

Thousands of young people with similar profiles have been checked, versions of a classmate of Georgi’s friend, twins from her class. The hypothesis of the involvement of Patrick Parvev, who after the murder of Georgi was arrested for the brutal beating of a 3-year-old child, was rejected. Parvev was forced by prisoners to write a confession, while the perpetrator of Georgi’s murder is still unknown.

The forensics got to Ioan Matev as the main suspect months before Georgi’s girlfriend shared her conversation with a girl from Matev’s class. The girl told Laura that everyone doubted him after the murder in Boris’s Garden. Then the investigation is “opened”. All the time, Matev is followed. He does everything possible to erase the traces of himself, including changing his appearance. She grows long hair. Train hard and build muscle. The day after the murder, he changed his Facebook profile, deleting his personal photos and replacing them with those of snipers.

On February 22, 2017, Matev was detained. His brother Marcel is with him. The boy tells a police psychologist that Ioan told him about Georgi’s murder shortly after the crime. He also indicated where he threw the knife, which was found 17 months later in a shaft. One of the controversial moments in the case against Ioan Matev was whether what his brother said could be valued as evidence, because it was in a conversation and there was no protocol, and the suspect had not yet been officially charged.