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Monday, July 30, 2012

Drawing, photo of Bulgaria bomber released (graphic)

Here is an image o the Bulgaria bomber pieced together by authorities based on his remains, according to a Romanian news site that says this has been confirmed by Bulgarian police:



The photo of his head were leaked by a Bulgarian site:

As Novite says:
The photos released by Bivol.bg show the distorted face of a young blue-eyed Caucasian male with black hair. The photos have seemingly been computer modified, Bivol.bg notes without specifying the source of the photos.

The report states that the images of the alleged Burgas Bus Bombing perpetrator further questions the version presented to the Bulgarian and international public by Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov that the attack was committed by a suicide bomber as it appears increasingly more likely that the bomber was in fact used as a "mule" by the real organizers of the attack.

According to this version, the young man was blown up from a distance without being aware that he was smuggling explosives into a bus that was supposed to take Israeli tourists from the Burgas Airport in Sarafovo to the Sunny Beach resort.

Bivol.bg cites as further evidence for this version the testimonies of an Israeli tourists, Gilat Kulangiya, who says she saw how the bomber removed suitcases from the baggage compartment of the bus in order to place there his bag; this led to a scandal between the bomber and Kulangiya's husband and another tourist, which is when the explosion occurred. The report presumes that the actual organizers of the terrorist attack decided to detonate the explosives in the backpack upon seeing the row from a distance.

Bivol.bg reminds the statement of former Chief of Israel's Counter-Terrorism Bureau, Brigadier General Nitzan Nuriel, who snubbed the suicide bomber version of the Bulgarian investigators, saying that the perpetrator was not a suicide bomber because he would have detonated the bomb in a different way to inflict more casualties, and that his task was to place the explosives on the bus.

Bivol's report notes further than on Friday the Bulgarian government members and MPs continued to reiterate the suicide bomber version in order to justify the failure of the Bulgarian security and intelligence services to prevent the July 18 terrorist attack, and reminds the conflicting statements of the Bulgarian leadership, with PM Boyko Borisov saying at one point that the bomber might have entered Bulgaria from the Schengen Area, while Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said there was no data that the bomber had been present on EU territory.

The site also says that original suspected accomplice is still potentially the person wanted for remotely detonating the bomb:

The former detainee at Guantanamo, Mehdi Ghezali, might in fact be the wanted accomplice involved in the July 18 terrorist attack in Bulgaria's Burgas, judging by his photos and computer-generated images of the potential accomplice.

The days immediately after the Burgas Bus Bombing saw initial media reports that Mehdi Ghezali, a Swedish citizen and former Guantanamo inmate, was a possible suspect to be the actual suicide bomber. This information was quickly repudiated by the police authorities of Bulgaria and Sweden, which, however, made no mention of Ghezali's current location and occupation, and provided no grounds to base their claims on.

A comparison of Ghezali's photo, which can easily be found online, where he has short hair, appears to match the computer-generated image distributed on July 21 by Israeli media of a man, who is believed to have been an accomplice in the Burgas terrorist attack, and might even have been the one who detonated the bomb from a distance once the suspected mule placed it on the bus filled with Israeli tourists. (Please see the photos above).

The computer-generated image of the wanted accomplice or perpetrator (if he was the one who detonated the bomb) in question appears to be based on testimonies of Bulgarian witnesses. Initial media investigations in Bulgaria, however, were based on the statement of the Bulgarian government that the attack was committed by a suicide bomber (which is different from the "mule blown up from a distance" version mentioned above); that is why most reports at first assumed that the description provided by witnesses must match that of a suicide bomber acting alone.
Here's another photo of the dead bomber's head and the reconstructed faces based on it: