Bulgaria stages Burgas bus explosion reenactment

Bulgarian investigators staged a re-enactment on Friday of a bus bombing that killed five Israeli tourists, the bus driver and the alleged perpetrator at Burgas airport in July 2012.     

The Europol-sponsored experiment, aimed to provide more details about the attack, was staged at a police compound near the city of Ihtiman, 40 kilometers (25 miles) east of the capital Sofia.                    

Two buses were positioned in the same way as they were at Burgas airport, while the bomb was a copy of the one that exploded, said Georgi Iliev, who heads the team of investigators.                        

Dummies, made of jelly material with silicone-based collagen to correspond to human muscle and bone density, were placed inside and around the buses according to security camera footage and witness accounts of the blast.                    

Smoke billowed into the sky from the stricken bus after the bomb exploded on Friday.                         

It was activated remotely, as it is believed to have been done by the terrorists.                     

Parts of the bus and of the dummies were ripped apart by the blast and could be seen as far as 100 meters (yards) off the spot.                          

The dummy of the alleged bomber with nearly three kilograms (6.6 pounds) of explosives in his backpack was placed half a meter from the luggage compartment with his back toward the bus.                        

After the blast, the head of the dummy was found 40 centimeters (1.3 feet) away from the spot where the head of the bomber in Burgas had been located, said Boyko Naydenov, director of the National Investigating Service.       

"All facts that we had established during the investigation so far, were confirmed by this explosion," Naydenov said but refused to elaborate.


APTN