Atanas Petrov Atanassov

Public record

Compiled from publications and official records as of 18.10.2026. Every statement links to its source; claims made by others are marked as such, with who makes them. Quotations in English are our translation.

Communist Party and State Security

• Judge and prosecutor before 1989. According to his Wikipedia biography, after graduating in law from Sofia University he was a judge in Ruse (1987–1988) and a prosecutor in Razgrad (1989–1992). In 1992–1995 he headed the regional Interior Ministry directorate in Razgrad; in 1997 he became secretary of the Interior Ministry, from 1998 to 2001 he was director of the National Security Service, and in 1999 he was made a major general. — Wikipedia (Bulgarian)
• The Razgrad prosecution office, 1989 (archive documents). The political scientist Anton Todorov, a former GERB MP and a political opponent of DB, published documents from the Razgrad State Archive on Zonanews in February 2021. According to the annual report of the Razgrad district prosecution office for 1989, "for a considerable part of the reporting year only the junior prosecutors Licheva and Atanasov worked in the district prosecution office, and they made commendable efforts in their work" (our translation). The 1989 work plan of the Razgrad regional prosecution office states: "The guiding principle in the activity of the regional and district prosecution offices of Razgrad region in 1989 will be the decisions of the Thirteenth Congress of the party, the National Party Conference and the July Concept of the BKP Central Committee" (our translation). According to the report Todorov cites, in 1989 the district prosecution office brought 9 charges for crimes against the People's Republic of Bulgaria; he also published a prosecution list of prisoners serving sentences as of 25 January 1989, most of whom, he says, were Bulgarian Turks with changed names. 1989 was the year of the mass expulsion of Bulgarian Turks to Turkey. The documents do not show which cases Atanasov handled himself. We have not found a reply from Atanasov to the publications. — Zonanews, 09.02.2021, Zonanews, 16.02.2021

Corruption and scandals

• Military Intelligence, 2024. In June 2024 the head of the Military Intelligence Service, Gen. Venelin Venev, accused Atanasov before parliament of trying to establish contact with officers of the service by offering them advancement in exchange for personal loyalty; according to the officers, Veselin Markov, an adviser to Prime Minister Denkov, told them he was speaking on Atanasov's behalf. Atanasov denies it, and his party called it an attack on an opposition leader. Former Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov said that, according to preliminary information, the prosecution had refused to open a case. — Mediapool, 26.06.2024
• The corruption report, 1999. According to Wikipedia, as director of the National Security Service Atanasov gave Prime Minister Ivan Kostov a list of 226 names from a corruption report on 10 December 1999; ten ministers were subsequently dismissed, among them Bogomil Bonev, Mario Tagarinski and Aleksandar Bozhkov. — Wikipedia (Bulgarian)