“There is no way it was an accident, there was nothing in the building that could have exploded without outside intervention,” Emilien Gebrev said in a telephone interview. The explosion occurred at a warehouse near the Bulgarian city of Karnobat in the early hours of Sunday. It is the fifth time in recent years that there have been explosions at facilities owned by Emco, Gebrev’s arms company. Bulgarian prosecutors have linked previous attacks to Russian agents. Ghebrev fell into a coma in 2015 and Western authorities and intelligence agencies believe he was poisoned with the novichok nerve agent by officers of Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU. He said this weekend’s fire was likely their doing as well. Gebrev said he spoke with his security director, who reported that an alarm system had been activated at the warehouse in the moments before the explosion, indicating an intrusion. The guards at the scene were preparing to investigate when they heard a huge explosion. No one was injured. He said there should be CCTV footage showing any intruders, but that so far police and investigators have been unable to enter the premises due to the possibility of further explosions. He said he hoped a proper investigation would begin Monday afternoon. Gebrev said the warehouse contained ammunition destined for African countries that had been ordered several years ago, but the buyers had not proceeded with payment. He declined to specify the types of weapons or their value. The apparent targeting of Gebrev by the GRU has led many to believe that he must be involved in arms supplies to Ukraine. Last year, he told The New York Times in an email that his companies had been involved in transporting arms to Ukraine, something he had previously denied. Now, he has again insisted that he has had nothing to do with Ukraine since the signing of the Minsk peace accord in late 2014 that led to a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine. It said it had not provided arms deliveries to the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February this year. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST Whatever the reason, Gebrev has apparently made powerful enemies in Russia. Between 2011 and 2020, explosions hit four warehouses and production facilities connected to his company. Last year, Bulgaria’s foreign ministry expelled a Russian diplomat over suspected Russian involvement in the blasts and called on Moscow to help investigate. Bulgarian prosecutors said there was “reasonable suspicion” that the four blasts were linked to the attempted poisoning of Gebrev. His son and a company director also fell into a coma. “I almost died,” Gebrev said, recalling the attack in a 2019 interview with the Guardian. The investigative website Bellingcat published evidence suggesting that a group of GRU agents were in Bulgaria at the same time as the poisoning. Ghebrev said Russian diplomats were “the tip of the iceberg” and complained that Bulgarian authorities had been unable to bring any of the cases to court. “It’s been 11 years since the first explosion and nobody has been punished for it,” he said.
