Word: vassilev
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...defendants were absent throughout the trial. The sole Bulgarian in court was Sergei Antonov, 37, the bespectacled deputy chief of Rome's Balkan Air office, who has been in Italian custody since 1982 and allegedly helped plan the plot. His presumed accomplices, Todor Aivazov, 43, and Zhelyo Vassilev, 44, Bulgarian embassy officials in Rome at the time of the shooting, were safely home in Sofia. Both left Italy shortly before Antonov's arrest as part of what Bulgarian officials called a normal embassy rotation. Two of the four Turkish defendants were also missing. Oral Celik, 27, the reputed second gunman...
Agca offered other testimony last week that probably unsettled some Communist capitals: Co-Defendant Zhelio Vassilev, a former Bulgarian military attache in Rome who is being tried in absentia, had worked out a plot to mislead investigators into thinking that Agca had acted alone in St. Peter's Square. When Agca was seized in the square, he was carrying a letter stating that the motive for shooting the Pope to protest U.S. and Soviet imperialism. "(Vassilev) suggested that I write (the letter) because in the event of capture it would be useful to give the impression of a lone killer...
...conspirator were hired by three Bulgarians to carry out the killing. Only one of the three, Sergei Antonov, 46, ex-chief of the Balkan Bulgarian Airlines office in Rome, is being held by the Italians. The others, former officials of the Bulgarian embassy in Rome, Jelio Kolev Vassilev, 43, and Todor Sotyanov Ayvazov, 42, are back home and have refused to return to Italy. The Bulgarian government has said that it will fully cooperate with the Italians. That raises the possibility of moving the hearing to Sofia at some point to take the absent defendants' testimony. Negotiations over just such...
Among them is Zhelio Vassilev, a former official of the Bulgarian embassy in Rome, who is currently in Sofia and thus beyond the reach of Italian law. Martella relates that according to Agca, Vassilev urged at a May 10, 1981, meeting of the conspirators that the shooting be carried out as soon as possible. According to Agca, Vassilev emphasized urgency be cause "French and Rumanian secret services . . . had come to know about the possibility of [the assassination], and that the news had probably been given to them by some Bulgarian who played a double-cross." Martella reports that "many confirmations...
...Bulgaria's Balkan Airlines office in Rome at the time of the assassination attempt and allegedly the plot's leader. Antonov remained in Italy even after authorities began to investigate the "Bulgarian connection" and was arrested in November 1982. Two other suspects, Todor Aivazov, 40, and Zhelio Vassilev, 42, are former officials of the Bulgarian embassy in Rome. They had returned to Sofia by the time warrants were first issued against them and remain beyond the reach of Italian...
| 1 |