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2 October 1996
Former Prime Minister Andrey Lukanov, from the Bulgarian Socialist Party, or BSP, was shot dead with four bullets in front of his home in Sofia. The circumstances remain unclear, and 13 years after the assassination no one has been indicted. The main hypotheses for Lukanov's murder include an internal party feud; or disagreements in the Bulgarian-Russian gas company, Topenergy, which he headed. Lukanov was the fourth Bulgarian prime minister to be assassinated, after Stefan Stambolov, who was stabbed to death in 1895; Dimitar Petkov, killed in 1907; and Aleksandar Stamboliyski, murdered in 1923.
11 October 1998
US First Lady Hillary Clinton landed in Sofia for the international conference Women in the 21st Century. The forum was organised by her Bulgarian counterpart, Antonina Stoyanova, and was attended by the wives of the Balkan presidents and women's organisations from the region.
16 October 1912
Bulgarian aviation had its first taste of gunpowder. Two weeks after the beginning of the First Balkan War Lieutenant Radul Milkov, a pilot, and Lieutenant Prodan Tarakchiev, an intelligence officer, flew an Albatross biplane from Svilengrad to Edirne and back. The flight lasted 1 hour 20 minutes at a height of about 500 m and achieved its mission: the two reached the fortress at Edirne, which was besieged by the Second Bulgarian Army, and noted the position of the enemy forces. This was the first reconnaissance flight in Bulgarian history.
17 October 2008
Ahmed Emin was found dead with a bullet in his right temple in the Boyana residence of Ahmed Dogan, leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, or DPS. According to police reports, Emin, head of the DPS cabinet, had shot himself with his legally owned gun. Officially, nobody knows what made the 42-year-old father of three kill himself. Rumours linked the death of Dogan's supposedly most trusted associate to a conflict in the DPS, or to Dogan himself. The investigation into Emin's death ended inconclusively, and the possible charge of coercion to suicide was dismissed.
26 October 1989
A rally of the informal association Ecoglasnost took place in what was then known as the Crystal Park, in front of the Military Club in Sofia. The supporters of the movement got together to sign a petition to the National Assembly demanding an end to the construction of water supply facilities, which were endangering the natural environment of the Rila Mountains. The police forced 22 of the protesters onto buses and drove them to South Park, where the gathering was officially permitted to take place. The eco demonstration, which coincided with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, or OSCE, meeting in Sofia on the Protection of the Environment, was one of the few dissident acts under Communist rule. Back then, open disagreements with the regime were not common in Bulgaria; instead, dissenters championed causes such as perestroika and ecology. A week later, Ecoglasnost's peaceful march to the National Assembly became the first mass opposition demonstration.
29 October 2006
Greeted by supporters dancing the horo, Socialist Georgi Parvanov, the leading candidate in the presidential election, and his wife Zorka Parvanova entered the National Palace of Culture for the traditional press conference on the night of the runoff. The official results were announced three days later: Parvanov had won a second five-year term of office against his opponent, Ataka leader Volen Siderov, with 76 percent of the vote. Before he became president in 2001, the first former Communist to be elected to this post after the fall of the regime in 1989, Parvanov was a historian in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and leader of the Bulgarian Socialist Party. Declassified documents would later show that he was a stooge for the Communist-era State Security as well, code-name Gotse.