Bulgarian arms depot hit by fire and explosions again

A fire and a series of explosions tore through an ammunition storage site in central Bulgaria overnight into Saturday, September 12, 2026, roughly five weeks after fire and explosions destroyed a separate EMCO storage building near Belitsa, Bulgaria, on August 10. No injuries were reported in either incident.

The blaze broke out near the village of Tsareva Livada, in Bulgaria’s Gabrovo region, and was visible lighting up the night sky in videos shared locally. Gabrovo’s regional governor, Kristina Sidorova, told journalists early Saturday that the fire was spreading from warehouse to warehouse across the storage grounds. Bulgarian authorities have not yet determined a cause.

The site belongs to EMCO, the arms company owned by Bulgarian businessman Emilian Gebrev, which has a documented history of unexplained blasts stretching back more than a decade. Bulgarian prosecutors said in 2021 they had established links between six Russian nationals and four remotely triggered explosions at EMCO facilities between 2011 and 2015, concluding at the time that the goal had been to halt munitions shipments EMCO was arranging for Ukraine and Georgia.

One of those blasts, a November 2011 explosion at an EMCO warehouse near the village of Lovnidol, was later tied specifically to Russia’s military intelligence service. An investigation by The Insider and Bellingcat, published in October 2023, described the attack as the first of its kind “convincingly attributed” to Unit 29155 of the GRU in a NATO and European Union country. Bulgaria issued arrest warrants in 2024 for six Russian citizens over the string of depot destructions.

Bulgarian prosecutors have also said they see a likely connection between the depot explosions and a poisoning attempt against Gebrev in April 2015, which also targeted his son and a company executive.

Saturday’s fire is not the first at a Gebrev-owned site in recent years. EMCO’s facility in Karnobat, in eastern Bulgaria, caught fire twice within roughly a year, once in July 2022 and again in June 2023. At the more recent Belitsa fire in August, EMCO manager Slavcho Dimiev said the blaze appeared to have started inside the building and that the company saw no grounds at that stage to suspect outside interference, floating spontaneous ignition of a propellant charge as one possible explanation. Bulgarian prosecutors kept deliberate sabotage among their lines of inquiry but had not settled on a cause by late August.

The new fire adds to a broader pattern of unexplained fires, explosions and suspected sabotage at defense-related sites across Europe this year, including a March fire at a drone and optics maker in Czechia, an April attack on power infrastructure serving French defense plants, an August explosion at an Italian ammunition factory, and an August arson at an Estonian robotics company that supplies equipment to Ukraine.

Western intelligence sources have told reporters they increasingly view the incidents as part of a Russian campaign built around deniability, using recruited local proxies or claims of responsibility from unrelated activist causes to make individual attacks hard to attribute. Even so, governments in Italy and Bulgaria have publicly rejected or downplayed a Russian role in their own cases, while Czech and Estonian authorities have said Russian involvement remains one of several theories under investigation, a split that reflects how difficult attribution has proven across the continent.

Bulgarian officials have not said whether Saturday’s explosion is connected to the earlier incidents or to any foreign actor, and the investigation into its cause remains open.