It is immoral to demand resignations while the accident is still being investigated, Radev is angry
The military should not have disseminated information from their internal investigation about the “Graf Ignatievo” crash, in which pilots Petko Dimitrov and Vencislav Dunkin died, let alone blame them for it. This was insisted on Wednesday by the Military District Prosecutor’s Office in Plovdiv, which is investigating the case.
A day earlier, an internal military investigation found that Dunkin and Dimitrov were flying at low altitude and low speed. However, the flight controller did not order them to end their task.
“Any information about the causes of the tragedy, as well as data directly related to the subject of the investigation,
constitute an investigative secret
and disclosing them by other bodies, except for the supervising prosecutor or without his express written permission, is essentially a violation of the Code of Criminal Procedure,” the prosecutor’s office says. And they assure that the statement of the military does not involve the investigation of the prosecutor’s office and will not affect it.
“It is inadmissible and incorrect, before the entire volume of physical and verbal evidence has been collected and the appointed expertises have been prepared, for officials outside the investigation bodies to launch in the public space conclusions about who is responsible for the tragic incident and to attribute blame to the dead “, they also write from the prosecution.
In order to draw conclusions about who is at fault, all the facts must be examined, including whether there was
violations by other officials,
including from the Air Force High Command.
Whether there are gaps in the work of the Air Force, another internal inspection of the military must determine. Only after it is over, will it be discussed whether there is a need for personnel changes. And politicians and public figures have been insisting on such for a long time.
“I cannot comment on hypotheses before all the facts about the accident are available. The imputation of responsibility, the political interference, the attempts to demand resignations while these commissions are working (who are investigating the incident – b.a.)are unethical and immoral to say the least”, President Rumen Radev was angry.
“I don’t know a commander who wants the death of his subordinates, but you see that this happens in the countries around us, it also happens in the most modern high-tech Air Force – those of the United States,” he said. The military must analyze not only the organization and preparation of flights, but also
whether the capabilities that NATO requires of us are provided,
Radev insisted.
He asked the parliamentary committee on defense to conduct an investigation. “The raid in our Air Force is extremely insufficient. The F-16 will hopefully come with the appropriate regulatory documents that require another sortie. And it is high time for the Bulgarian state to provide it, so I appeal to the defense commission to intervene. We cannot ask complex tasks with a high level of preparation to be carried out without ensuring the conditions for the airmen and their commanders”, explained the president.