After a delay of nearly two years, the case against the British citizen Daniel Hull for sexual assault against 14 children from Sliven is scheduled for May 14. This is shown by a reference in the e-justice portal, "Dnevnik" reported.
The case was postponed due to the recusal of all criminal judges from the Sliven District Court to whom it was assigned. This is how it came to the last possible option - to assign the case to a civil judge.
The criminal case against the British man began after his arrest on August 10, 2022. It is about sexual acts committed with 14 boys aged 8 to 14 between February 2021 and August 2022. The exact number of the children suffered by Daniel Hull, however, is difficult to ascertain. What he committed, according to the indictment, is "a particularly serious case of sexual acts with persons of the same sex, punishable by imprisonment from five to twenty years".
Hull had the wonderful chance of remaining unnoticed in the city's Roma quarter for years. What's more - during the attempts to arrest him, he was defended by the parents of the children with whom he had sexual relations.
According to unofficial data from the investigation, Hull collected money from donations through campaigns on the Internet, and with them he bought the trust of people living in the ghetto by covering the costs of repairing their houses, furnishing bathrooms, buying shoes and clothes for their children, provided them with food and paid for medical examinations and manipulations. In return, his parents reciprocated their trust by entrusting their children to him as a pastor and even allowing them to spend the night at Hull's home.
However, the drama of the fourteen boys does not end with the arrest of the British man on August 10, 2022. It continues to this day with the de facto denial of justice in the subsequent total of five dismissals of criminal judges in Sliven, to whom the case was assigned.
Protocols from the court sessions on April 4 and October 24 of this year, in which the first two judges - Tsanka Nedelcheva and Ivan Dimitrov from the Sliven District Court recused themselves from the sexual assault case, are not available in the justice.bg system . However, the motives of the other three have been documented.
On September 5 the first of them, Ivan Dimitrov, terminated the proceedings in a dispositional hearing on the case assigned to him due to serious procedural violations committed in the pre-trial phase and returned it to the prosecutor's office. However, with a decision of the District Court in Sliven, his reasons were rejected and the case was assigned to him again with the originally prepared indictment. Immediately afterwards, Dimitrov removed himself, as he was already considered biased because he expressed an opinion on the way the investigation was conducted.
"In many cases, this reason for removing judges is simply used as a pretext to get rid of a case and reduce their workload," said Stoyko Slavov, a defender of some of the injured children.
After Dimitrov's appeal, the case was assigned to the president of the Regional Court in Sliven, Anna Dimitrova. On December 13 she also objects on the grounds that she was the one who imposed the initial remand on Daniel Hull and thus already expressed an opinion on his guilt.
Nevertheless, she schedules it, but waits for defendant Hull's lawyer to request her recusal himself, which she readily does.
The last - fifth appeal in the case is by judge Nikola Marinov from the District Court in Sliven. According to the protocol of the meeting in the case dated March 20 of this year. Marinov excuses himself on the grounds that the defendant's defense attorney has no confidence in his objectivity.
"The court should accept that none of the panel is biased, but in order to avoid any doubts about its impartiality, it should be removed from the consideration of the case and it should be reported for the appointment of a new rapporteur on the principle of random election", it is written in the minutes of the meeting.