EditAnother EMKO depot burns in Bulgaria – 33 days after the last blast
The narrative of “industrial accident” is a hard sell to anyone who has followed the file
A night fire and a chain of explosions at an ammunition warehouse in Gabrovo revive a decade-long question: accident, or the next chapter of a Russian sabotage campaign against Europe’s Soviet-calibre shell makers?
Late on Friday, 11 September, a fire broke out in an ammunition warehouse belonging to the private Bulgarian arms company EMKO, near the village of Gorni Varpishta in Gabrovo region, about four to five kilometres from Tsareva Livada. Residents heard a series of blasts. The national warning system BG-Alert was triggered. The fire jumped from warehouse to warehouse. The last explosion came shortly before midnight. Three fire crews were sent in. The nearest settlement is more than a kilometre away. Interior Ministry officials said there was no danger to the public. No one was reported killed or injured. Two guards moved away in time; the building itself was empty. The site holds ammunition and gunpowder, EMKO manager Slavcho Dimiev told Bulgarian National Television. Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev and the ministry’s chief secretary were due on the scene; police scheduled a statement for 11:00 on Saturday at the Tsareva Livada level crossing.
It was the second EMKO blast in just over a month. On 10 August a fire and explosions tore through an ammunition warehouse near Belitsa, in Tryavna municipality. About 300 workers were evacuated. Unexploded rounds and metal debris were later found. The company ruled out human error. The minister at the time said there was no evidence of “external interference” and leaned toward an internal cause – a vehicle used in loading was mentioned, then disputed by the plant manager. A month on, the Gabrovo prosecutor’s office said it had not closed any version of events. DANS, the national security agency, had been brought in. Eleven witnesses had been questioned. The warehouse was gone. The cause was not settled.
Explosion at Bulgarian arms plant revives Russian sabotage concerns
Democratic Bulgaria MP Ivaylo Mirchev did not wait for Saturday’s briefing. Thirty-three days after the previous blast, he wrote, Bulgarian military stores were burning again. Germany had just accused Russia over a drone-and-explosives plot against Leipzig airport. NATO and Western services have warned for months that Moscow’s sabotage campaign in Europe is widening. “What Russia does in Leipzig is happening in Bulgaria,” he said, demanding a hearing of the security chiefs, a temporary parliamentary commission and answers from the government and the president’s security council. Instead, he argued, the country got “ducking down” – and another night of exploding sheds.
Why this company keeps appearing in the blast reports
EMKO, founded in 1992 and controlled by arms trader Emilian Gebrev, is export-oriented. It makes Soviet-standard artillery and tank ammunition – the calibres Ukraine has burned through since 2022. Gebrev has said he was ready to join a European shell coalition for Kyiv. Bulgaria still draws a formal line between state deliveries and private exports; the practical effect is the same. Plants that can still turn out 122 mm and 152 mm rounds sit on the logistics map of the war. They also sit on a map of fires.
The list is long. An EMKO depot at Lovnidol blew up in November 2011; shells there were destined for Georgia. Warehouses at Karnobat burned in 2022 and again in 2023. Gebrev said those were not accidents. Other Bulgarian defence sites – Arsenal in Kazanlak, VMZ Sopot, Gorni Lom, Petolachkata, Kostenets, Maglizh, Iganovo – have their own scars. Dozens of people have died in such incidents over fifteen years. In 2021 Bulgarian prosecutors tied a series of depot blasts to Russia’s GRU and put Russian officers on wanted lists. Trials in absentia have not produced a finished reckoning. EMKO’s own line after August was that earlier investigations “remain at a dead end… despite all our calls for results.” Investigative reporter Christo Grozev noted the same pattern on the day of the Tryavna blasts: another EMKO site, the same owner who was poisoned in 2015.
The poisoning that made Gebrev a European case
In April 2015 Gebrev, his son and a senior colleague collapsed in Sofia after a dinner. Investigators later linked the toxin to a Novichok-class agent and to GRU Unit 29155 – the same unit tied to the Skripal attack in Salisbury and to the 2014 explosions at Vrbětice in the Czech Republic, where ammunition connected to Gebrev’s trade was stored. In 2020 Bulgaria charged three GRU officers in absentia over the Gebrev case: Denis Sergeev, Sergei Lyutenko and Egor Gordienko. Gebrev has called the attempt a joint operation of “Bulgarian rulers and Russian interests.” Bellingcat and partner investigations have described Unit 29155’s work in Bulgaria as among the first known GRU sabotage hits on NATO soil.
That history is why “industrial accident” is a hard sell to anyone who has followed the file – and why official Sofia still reaches for it. Newly finished shells do not, as former defence minister and NATO diplomat Boyko Noev put it after the August fire, “simply explode by themselves.” Something, or someone, causes it. Noev’s argument goes further: Bulgaria has been a laboratory for Russian hybrid war for fifteen years; its prosecution service and security apparatus, under successive GERB- and DPS-linked governments, too often buried the Russian thread; a planned case against six GRU officers stalled. Europe has logged well over a hundred hybrid attacks. Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic are in the same fight. Bulgaria, he says, should stop pretending it is a local fire-safety problem and help lead a coalition against the campaign.
What is known tonight – and what is not
What is known about Gorni Varpishta is still thin: time, place, no casualties, ammunition and powder in the sheds, fire moving bay to bay, the same company, the same region, thirty-three days after Belitsa. What is not known is the ignition. That was also unknown, officially, a month ago.
Two interpretations now sit side by side. One is technical failure in an old storage system under wartime production pressure. The other is the hypothesis that has followed Gebrev since Lovnidol and the Marinela Hotel: that Russian military intelligence has spent years trying to kill the man and burn the stock that can still feed Ukrainian guns. The first is what ministers prefer to say before the experts finish. The second is what the last decade of European investigations keeps putting back on the table every time another EMKO roof goes up.
Until Gabrovo’s prosecutors, DANS and whoever arrives from Sofia produce more than a cordon and a noon briefing, the country is left with the same unfinished sentence it had on 10 August — and in 2023, and in 2022, and in 2015, and in 2011. The warehouses keep burning. The owner is still alive. The question of who lights them does not go away.
Caption:
Screenshot from an early morning Sunday new bulletin on national broadcaster BNT [EUalive]
Updated: September 12, 2026 - 07:57
