For the second week in a row, the mysterious death of the five men from the Petrokhan hut and the 15-year-old boy is in the center of public attention, bTV recalls.
Interviews, stories and leaked testimonies from interrogations of parents and their relatives, however, continued the suspicions of sexual abuse of children by the alleged leader of the group, Ivaylo Kalushev.
They highlight 5 cases of his cohabitation with underage boys, without this in itself proving child abuse. The cases are also reflected in a leaked report from the National Agency for National Security and Defense of Bulgaria (DANS) for 2024, published two days ago by the investigative website BYRD, the content of which has not been denied by the agency at this time.
The first of the children is Valeri Andreev, who lived with Kalushev back in 2011, when he was 15 years old. He was the only one who later personally reported to the authorities that he was a victim of sexual exploitation. His parents entrusted him to Kalushev because they believed that he helped troubled children. They knew him as a hypnotherapist and Buddhist teacher. The child had a drug addiction, his mother said a few days ago in an interview for the program “Agenda“ by Genka Shikerova and Mirolyuba Benatova.
“To the grass that was. He was a student at the Sofia Mathematical High School, in the most elite class - with German. A great regression has begun,“ Sofia Andreeva announced in the interview.
According to the available data, Valeri lived with Kalushev in a house near the Botevgrad village of Kraevo – away from the others, in the forest. According to the Property Register, it was owned by Kalushev from 2006 to 2012, when he sold it to the family of the same minor Valeri.
The property is registered in the boy's name. When our team visited the house, no one answered. The deputy mayor and long-time resident of the village spoke about the time when Kalushev lived here.
“He was somewhere with an address registration in the village. He didn't communicate much with the people of the village. I've seen them here with ATVs, walking up towards the forest. At one time there was also a girl – Nevena. "She was also registered here," says Krasimira Dimitrova, the deputy mayor of Kraevo.
When asked if they had guests, she answers: "There were cars, they came here. Yes, we have seen cars coming."
The memory of the people of the village about Kalushev is scarce. He did not communicate with the locals.
However, we heard some details of his life here on "120 Minutes" a week ago from a man who wished to remain anonymous. As his former spiritual follower, the man used to come to Kraevo, but later their relations deteriorated.
Here is more from his story: "The idea was to buy 35 acres of land there in Kraevo and build a large monastery - a "stupa" - and to make it a center for Buddhism in the Balkans. He was with Nevena and Deyan, they lived together in this house in Kraevo. There was already a Sanga. Sanga is a group of Buddhists - an open community of people who follow this teaching, but he made it closed and turned it into a sect. He didn't let people in, he chose people, those who had the potential to be processed, to give money. Give 10,000 leva, 15,000 leva. He had been living with a young boy inside the house since then.
In 2012, Kalushev sold the house and took Valeri to Mexico, together with Nevena and Deyan, nicknamed the Mexican, whose names coincide with those of the man who first reported the death of three of Kalushev's people near the Petrokhan hut.
In Mexico, they bought land with an entrance to the Ixtlan cave to explore it. They built this ranch there, according to GPS coordinates in the report submitted by the National Security Agency.
It is being checked whether these photos from a Facebook profile named Don Silvio Manuel are not from the same ranch. The profile also published photos from Kalushev's cave expedition in Yucatan.
Valery lived in Mexico for 5 years, but due to deteriorating relations with Kalushev, he returned to Sofia.
Months later, he told his parents that he was sexually exploited by his mentor. His mother Sofia Andreeva also admitted this to “Dneven red“. However, she still does not believe her own son. She is convinced that Kalushev helps children and is not capable of this crime. And she even blames the boy.
“At no point have I ever believed it. It's just that the moment he escaped from there and returned, I somehow lost trust in him. He was all my hope. And I hope my son is alive and well for a long time so that he can bear this disgrace. He is the moral murderer of the people who took care of him“, commented Sofia Andreeva.
In 2022, the now adult Valery still reported that he was sexually exploited to the Cybercrime Directorate of the Bulgarian State Anti-Corruption Bureau – he himself announced this a few days ago in an audio interview with journalist Maria Chereshova and the website BIRD.
“I explained the whole story to them at great length and in detail, I told them about the sailing, about the monetary donations that I helped make happen, about my sexual relations with Kalushev, about the suspicions that this could happen to a young child who appeared there and lived with him extremely quickly“, says Valeri.
The special police officers invited Valeri to testify for an official investigation, but he refused out of concerns about what he had experienced, the DANS report says. Thus, the case was closed without any investigation.
The second child to live with the late Ivaylo Kalushev was Nikolay Zlatkov, brought by his parents to Mexico at the age of 11 in 2014.
After the return of Lama Ivo and his people to Bulgaria, Nikolay became a member of the board of directors of the National Agency for Control of Protected Areas, based in the Petrokhan hut. Now the young man is among those shot and found dead near Okolchitsa.
There are no reports of lewd acts against this child to this day. In her interview after the death of the 6-team in the Petrokhan case, his mother Ralitsa Asenova stated that she believed the late mentor Kalushev.
The father, also named Nikolay Zlatkov, was worried about what the child was doing alone in Mexico and went there, but did not come to any firm conclusions about abuse, we read in his testimony leaked to the media.
The third child around Kalushev is Nikolay's younger brother from another father, the DANS report says. The man, named Svilen Svilenov, expressed concern about the boy's alienation in Mexico.
The name of the fourth child in a row from Kalushev's entourage appears in 2024 in a signal from his grandparents. We showed it a week ago. At that time, Leon was 8 years old and lived in the Petrokhan hut in the company of Kalushev and his associates. The alert contained concerns about his long stay with the men in the hut, but after information leaked to Kalushev and the boy's mother, the alert was withdrawn.
The fifth child close to Kalushev, the now deceased 15-year-old son of speleologist Yani Makulev – Alexander, was among the six people shot. His father was close to Kalushev and now, after the death of his child, states that he does not doubt his son's mentor.
“I do not doubt the qualities and personality of Ivaylo Kalushev. I will not provide evidence, I have my own conviction for this“, the father announced.
The five children listed around Kalushev lived away from school. Before going to Kalushev, the last three boys – Nikolay Zlatkov's brother, Leon, and Makulev's late son were deregistered from their previous educational institutions and registered at the private school "Kosmos" in the village of Osoytsa near Sofia. Makulev was admitted here with a scholarship, but did not attend school 114 out of nearly 170 school days last year, according to an inspection by the Ministry of Education and Science at the private institution.
As bTV has already reported, the prosecutor's office has opened and closed two separate investigations against Ivaylo Kalushev on suspicion of child abuse. Since 2024 and 2025, prosecutors have established that one of the above-mentioned 5 children traveled with Kalushev to Nepal, Italy and France.
Data was taken from several institutions, two children were questioned in the presence of a psychologist, but no evidence of a crime was found.
Investigators have never collected evidence.
Until now, when the 15-year-old child and Nikolay Zlatkov were found dead, along with Kalushev and his three associates, the men's files are clean. They were found dead from gunshot wounds in the “Petrokhan“ hut and near Okolchitsa Peak, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs has imposed the most likely version of group suicide, combined with the murder of one of the men, who also took his own life.
The death of this group of people remains shrouded in doubt – as well as their lives. The properties in Kraevo, the trip across the ocean to Mexico, their expensive equipment for scuba diving and cave exploration, the land purchased in Yucatan, the ranch built, the purchase of the Petrohan hut in 2020, the snowmobiles, cameras, drones and numerous weapons in the forest have cost solid amounts of money.
Officially, Kalushev bought the “Petrohan“ hut from a company owned by the father of former MP Iskra Fidosova for 96,000 leva. At the end of 2021, he bought the 5 acres of state forest around it for 98 stotinki per square meter, the property register shows. He took advantage of his right as a private owner of property in the forest and the law allows him to claim it as the only possible buyer, explained the Executive Forestry Agency, which sold the massifs.
The properties, equipment and cars around the men in the last 10 years, however, raise the question of where their income comes from.
There were donors around them who financed them. The mother of the first boy in our history, Valeri, is known for this so far, with her “over 1 million leva“, “offerings“ for the activities of the mysterious guru.
The group's most recent donor is businesswoman Sasha Bezuhanova. According to her, she was approached by the organization and decided to fund a monitoring project for large natural areas because she believed it would become a good model for nature conservation.
The current mayor of Sofia, Vasil Terziev, is also a donor. According to him, before taking office as mayor, he donated between 70 and 80 thousand euros to the association for electric motorcycles so that they could move quietly in the forest in pursuit of environmental causes.
Against this background, however, the annual financial reports of the association of the fallen men for the last three years show many times fewer donations received – less than 59,000 leva in total. Where is the rest of the donated money?
The now deceased Kalushev, Ivanov, Vassilev, Stattev and Zlatkov are also founders of another organization - the “Bulgarian Extreme Sports Association“. However, no donations have been received there since 2018, according to their reports. In 2022, their assets of machinery, machines and equipment jumped to over 210,000 leva. Their last published report is for 2024. It makes it clear that the extreme sports association is in debt by over 475,000 leva to suppliers and private creditors.
The investigators of the sinister “Petrohan“ case have not yet released official data on the flow of money to the mysterious group of Ivaylo Kalushev.