Bulgarian authorities said Sunday they found the bodies of three suspects wanted over a triple murder linked to an allegedly shady NGO which one prosecutor said was like something out of the iconic TV series “Twin Peaks.”
The three — two men and a 15-year-old boy — were found Sunday, dead from gunshots, in a camping van close to Mount Okolchitsa, a peak in western part of the Balkan Mountains, national police chief Zahari Vaskov told a news conference.
Their bodies were discovered some 50 miles from a burnt-out mountain lodge where the triple murder was discovered a week ago, on February 2. The emergency call came from a shepherd who noticed a person apparently dead at the wheel, the Sofia News Agency reported.
The three men murdered in the lodge — also by gunshot — all belonged to an NGO called the National Protected Areas Control Agency (NAKZT).
Vaskov said the triple murder, and the three bodies found on Sunday in the caravan — which also belonged to NAKZT — amounted to “an unprecedented crime, at least for Bulgaria.”
“Whether this is a murder, a suicide – we are pursuing all possible scenarios,” he said, according to the Bulgarian News Agency .
He said the gunshots appeared to have taken place inside the van, and investigators were looking into “all possible hypotheses.”
NAKZT presents itself as a mountain rangers operation which also hosts holiday camps for youngsters.
But two years ago it was accused in a criminal complaint of alleged “sexual abuse of children” and turned out to possess a “paramilitary” apparatus, the interim head of Bulgaria’s State Agency for National Security, Denyo Denev, said on Wednesday.
Bulgaria’s acting prosecutor general, Borislav Sarafov, on Wednesday told a news conference that NAKZT was believed to engage in activities not “in conformity with God’s will, or the interests of society, the country and of children”.
He evoked a similarity in the case with “Twin Peaks”, the American TV show about an FBI agent making bizarre and horrific discoveries in a fictional town as he investigates a murder. The show’s groundbreaking director, David Lynch, died last year.