Man held in Bulgarian journalist murder probe: police

SOFIA, Bulgaria: A Romanian has been detained as part of the probe into the killing of a Bulgarian journalist in the northern town of Ruse, police said on Tuesday.

“We have detained a man. We’re still checking his alibi so he is not officially a suspect for committing the crime yet,” Ruse police chief commissioner Teodor Atanasov told journalists.

The man — a Romanian — was being held for 24 hours, Atanasov said.

The brutal killing of 30-year-old Viktoria Marinova — who presented a current affairs talk programme called “Detector” for the small TVN television channel — has shocked the country and drawn international condemnation.

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Her body was discovered in a park in Ruse on Saturday.

The interior minister Mladen Marinov and a spokeswoman for the town’s chief prosecutor were scheduled to hold a press conference later Tuesday afternoon.

Authorities say Marinova died from blows to the head and suffocation. She had also been raped.

Prosecutors have said “all leads” are being considered, including possible links to Marinova’s professional activity.

She had recently been working on corruption allegations against businessmen and politicians.

Marinova is the third journalist to be murdered in Europe in the past 12 months after Jan Kuciak in Slovakia in February and Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta in October 2017.