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WARSAW – When the body of a 30-year-old woman, bruised, beaten and raped, was discovered on Saturday in a park in the city of Ruse in north-eastern Bulgaria, the appalling crime scene stunned a countries where corruption is endemic but murder threatened relatively rare.
The victim was identified Sunday as Viktoria Marinova, a journalist who hosted a new talk show entitled "Detector", which offered a meeting place for investigative journalists. The national shock provoked by his brutal death quickly spread to the international community.
Despite the disagreement over Ms. Marinova's role in corruption investigations, the issues surrounding her death reflect the climate of tension that prevailed in the region: two journalists from the European Union – Jan Kuciak in Slovakia and Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta – were killed in the last year because of the work they were doing to denounce corruption at the highest levels of government.
Bulgarian officials condemned the attack on Ms. Marinova, but they also insisted that there was no reason to believe that she had been killed because of her work. They stated that there was no evidence that she had been threatened and noted that her car keys, cell phone and clothes were missing.
"It is about rape and murder," said Interior Minister Mladen Marinov, a point of view shared by Prime Minister Boiko Borisov.
"The best criminologists have been sent to Ruse, do not hurry them," Borisov said. "A large amount of DNA has been obtained."
Ms. Marinova was last seen alive Saturday morning, while she was having coffee with friends and then running along the Danube.
Attorney General Sotir Tsatsarov told reporters Monday in Ruse that nothing would be ruled out, but he also said that it was unlikely that the murder was related to his work.
"The assumption that the murder is linked to his work and the topics in his program is not decisive," he said, refusing to give further details on the investigation. In progress.
Some EU lawmakers and press freedom advocates, however, were reluctant to accept the government's suggestion that Marinova's work coincided with her death.
"The leaders must be held accountable," Harlem Desir, media freedom representative at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, wrote on Twitter, asking for a full investigation.
The brutal crimes have rocked Ruse, where murders are rare. Last year, there were only five murders in the small town of about 150,000 inhabitants. Across Bulgaria, which has a population of just over 7 million, police recorded 260 killings.
In 2016, there was 1.1 homicides per 100,000 population in Bulgaria. In the United States, the murder rate in 2016 was 5.3 per 100,000.
Bulgaria has been ranked among the most corrupt nations in the European Union and among the worst in terms of freedom of the press. More than 10 years after joining the bloc, he reported only limited progress in the fight against corruption.
The Center for the Study of Democracy, based in Sofia, presented in a report last year the portrait of a state so torn by corruption that one-third of adults, either 1.3 million people reportedly participated in corruption. transaction, such as paying or receiving a bribe.
According to a report published in 2016 by the research organization RAND Europe, the country loses between 7 and 12 billion dollars every year because of corruption, one-fifth of its gross domestic product.
At the same time, the number of independent media reporting corruption has decreased. The Union of Publishers in Bulgaria, in According to a report published in May, "the growing collusion between publishers, oligarchs and political parties over the past decade has resulted in a significant decline in press freedom".
Teodor Zahov, chairman of the organization, said in a statement that "the pressure on the independent media has been systematic for 10 years."
"It's so sophisticated and not very transparent that some people do not understand it and others do not believe it," he said.
In this gloomy environment, the concern of the international community following the murder of Ms. Marinova – particularly in the European Union, which prided itself on supporting freedom of the press – has changed rapidly.
"We need to quickly determine whether the murder is linked to Marinova's research on the misuse of US funds," said Sven Giegold, German member of the European Parliament. "Freedom of the press is seriously threatened in Europe if the research on corruption ends in death".
The assassinations of Mr Kuciak in Slovakia and Mrs Caruana Galizia in Malta have alarmed the Continent. A new group of declared populist leaders in the region used increasingly harsh language to attack journalists, especially those who were investigating corruption.
In February, 27-year-old Kuciak and his 27-year-old fiancée Martina Kusnirova were shot dead after starting to make connections between top government officials and organized crime. Police said the murders were related to Mr. Kuciak's work. They have recently arrested several people suspected of involvement, including a man who, according to the authorities, was a clubbed man. He was identified last week as Tomas Szabo, a former police officer who spent nine years in the police but was reported to have financial difficulties.
Prosecutors said Szabo and his accomplices had received "at least € 70,000, or about $ 80,000, for the murder of Mr. Kuciak. They believe that her fiancee was not targeted but was "in the wrong place at the wrong time".
The Slovak authorities stated that they had reduced the list of persons suspected of having ordered the murder but that they had refused to provide details during the investigation, pointing out that the conspiracy may have also targeted a senior prosecutor involved in corruption prosecutions.
The public anger over Kuciak's death sparked numerous demonstrations and forced Prime Minister Robert Fico to resign.
Kuciak's assassination comes several months after one of Malta's most well-known investigative journalists, Ms. Caruana Galizia, 53, was killed. killed when a the bomb blew up his car. It also examined allegations of money laundering and fraud among companies and the country's political elite. Three men were arrested and charged with laying the bomb.
But this investigation seems to be stalled and there has been no public comment on who could have ordered the murder.
The first episode of Ms. Marinova's broadcast was broadcast on September 30 and featured two investigative journalists – Dimitar Stoyanov from the website Bivol.bg and Attila Biro from the Romanian project Rise Project – discussing their investigation into fraud charges involving EU funds related to businessmen and politicians in Bulgaria.
Follow Marc Santora on Twitter: @MarcSantoraNYT.
Boryana Dzhambazova contributed to the report from Sofia, Bulgaria; and Miroslava Germanova from Bratislava, Slovakia.
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