EEP member shown secret police murders files on East German fugitives shot in Bulgaria

AIA already reported about recent revelations by a Bulgarian official that the country's communist-era border troops killed East Germans who had fled across Europe and tried to get to the West through the Balkan country's borders. These days the German Member of the European Parliament Gisela Kallenbach (the Greens) was shown two cardboard boxes of "murders files" from the archives of Bulgaria's Border Police about the targeted killings of the East Germans trying to escape to the West before 1989, Sofia News Agency reports. Kallenbach is in Bulgaria in order to collect data about the East Germans shot dead by the Bulgarian Border Police before 1989 while trying to make their way to Greece and Turkey.
At the end of 2007 the German magazine Der Spiegel published materials about the so called "fugitives from the republic", disclosing the Embassy of the former German Democratic Republic in Bulgaria had paid the communist regime in Sofia BGN 2000 for every East German shot at the Bulgarian border while trying to escape from the Eastern Block. According to the investigation of the German historian Stefan Apelius some 2000 East Germans were shot by border patrols while trying to cross the border into Greece and Turkey. The partially opened archives from the Interior Ministry also reveal that 22 Bulgarians were shot while trying to escape to Greece and Turkey only in the period of 1964-67.
The Interior Ministry files contain information about 415 East Germans arrested at the Bulgarian borders, but also about a number of Polish and Hungarian citizens. Yekaterina Boncheva from the Files Committee said in 1975 there was a proposal to destroy these files, Sofia News Agency marks. It adds that many pieces of documentation from the Interior Ministry files are missing. The files from the Ministry of Defense and the National Investigation Service have not been opened yet.
Apart from information about the targeted killings of East Germans in Bulgaria, the opened files also contain information about the cooperation between Stasi, the secret service of the former East Germany, and Bulgaria's State Security Services. The correspondence between them was conducted only in Russian.