He's the Tramp with Three Bookbags: The Man with mental disorder, accused of threatening magistrates. He is the perfect lunatic, used and discarded. Who is Ilko Zahariev, called the Red Pirate?
His case can be sorted into the disturbing series of strange "crimes" attributed to homeless vagrants, to insolvent bums, to mentally ill patients. People who are used as a convenient cover by other individuals. These are usually acts that the prosecution prefers not to investigate despite the obvious inconsistencies in attacking defenseless persons. But let's start in order.
Who is the Red Pirate
The Red Pirate, who until a few days ago was thought to be untraceable, has not disappeared. Ilko Zahariev contacted his lawyer and returned to his father in Burgas.
Who he really is: child of divorced parents. Graduated with honors. Applied architecture. Diagnosed with a mental disorder.
The mind of a mentally unbalanced person usually seeks solace in the refuge of childhood, where personal memories caress the senses and erase the sense of helplessness. There and then, when the world is clear, simple, lovable. There and then, when trust is dominant in relations between people. This is probably the filter through which Ilko Zahariev observes the life around him. This is how his public defender Georgi Georgiev described it:
"Ilko is extremely intelligent, with a good memory, but he is incredibly trusting, and this is dangerous for himself. He excelled in high school mathematics, but probably after his parents' divorce he lost stability, and the frustration with reality unlocked strong defense mechanisms of his psyche, which subsequently intensified.
He's always looking for memories from the past, always mentioning that he's an A-classman, as if he's still living in that time of security, when he had a stable family and friends and felt successful."
The Profile of the Perfect Insane
But childhood comes to an end, and everyone goes through family upheavals and upheavals that are hard to deal with. Ilko Zahariev also finds himself at the crossroads of this distorted reality, after a broken sense of security.
He broke furniture in his home, for which he was briefly detained in Sliven, threatening "the world", for which a case has already been filed against him. Then the prosecutor considers that it is a matter of mental illness and transforms the case under the Health Act with a request for compulsory placement in a psychiatric institution. The forensic psychiatric examination established that Ilko suffers from paranoid schizophrenia.
It is this profile that turns out to be very suitable to be used when needed.
This is how the Red Pirate appears on the scene as potentially the sole perpetrator of a series of threats - some of which against judge Vladislava Tsarigradska.
Let's remember - this is the judge who refuses to decide cases under dictation, who was openly threatened in the courtroom by Martin Bojanov - the "Notary", the judge against whom a large-scale slanderous campaign was launched by the "Peevs" media, and after the murder of the "Notary" became the target of more and more terrible threats.
And since it is not difficult to assume that behind the threats are precisely those persons who are supposed to be part of a huge network of influence in the justice system and who are doing everything possible to keep it hidden, they have you need a handy bum, a person with deviant behavior and a mental disorder, to be beaten, to divert the tracks and not realize that he is being used.
The tramp with three book bags
Ilko Zahariev is a homeless man detained in the area of the Boyan cemetery in Sofia, he was carrying three bags with books and one with expensive food. It is curious that even before Ilko was identified and detained, the version of the GDBOP was already spreading in the media that "the man who threatened Judge Tsarigradska is mentally unbalanced and leads a wandering lifestyle".
He is accused under Art. 144, para. 3 of the Criminal Code - a death threat sent to hundreds of addressees, including municipalities, courts, state departments, the prime minister, etc. with general political messages.
A member of the Sofia District Court ruled that Ilko Zahariev be released, as the author has no intention of carrying out his threat, but rather expresses his dissatisfaction with the judicial and law enforcement system.
Unknowingly, Ilko himself becomes a victim of his own prophecies.
According to his public defender, Ilko Zahariev is not the author of most of the emails. The two phones found in his possession even had domains in Nigeria. In March, Zahariev indicated that he found the phones in an e-waste bin in a metropolitan mall, as he was collecting old equipment to return for recycling. "Either they were thrown to him, or they were given to him,", his lawyer pointed out at the time.
His "full confessions" were made immediately after detention without a lawyer, without even calling a psychiatrist.
It is interesting that the psychiatrist and psychologist appointed by the prosecutor's office are members of the so-called "librarian" university (UNIBIT) and are members of an association for aviation, marine and space medicine - a strange choice according to professional criteria, which could also be read as an attempt to thwart the possibility of Ilko Zahariev's testimony leading to the real instigators and perpetrators.
And one begins to wonder - is it possible for the prosecutor's office to conduct a quality investigation if it has to investigate itself?
There are many questions to be answered:
Is Ilko Zahariev technically capable of doing everything he is accused of through the phones that were found in his possession - one of which had a broken display?
Is he able to create texts, some of which are stylistically quite different, open applications, find the e-mails of the institutions, create accounts, send the same message to 50 recipients, connect them in a network, use public networks to send them, etc., etc.?
All this can be tested in a controlled environment to establish his technical, computer and language skills. But probably no such check will be made. Because - in the opinion of lawyers - here we are observing classic approaches from the old Soviet school of using people with mental illnesses.
Used and discarded
It is no coincidence that the Bulgarian NK and NPK were almost literally copied from the Russian ones. As if to maintain a constant legal uncertainty in the people, to serve the criminal environment and not society. At the same time, in combination with the enormous power that the prosecutor's office has in the pre-trial phase, in combination with the key role of the chief prosecutor.
According to Ilko Zahariev's public defender, this case is a classic example of how a sick person can be used and thrown away so that the real perpetrators and instigators are not discovered.
If the prosecution has come to the conclusion that Ilko Zahariev was in a state of insanity, it must terminate the investigation and give access to all materials to the injured judge Vladislava Tsarigradska.
At the moment, however, the prosecutor's office is "hitting the ball" because access to all materials will most likely open a new chapter in the history of legal outrages in Bulgaria.
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This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial team and of DV as a whole.