Second Fire Hits Bulgarian Arms Depot in Weeks, Officials Don't Rule Out Sabotage

A fire tore through a weapons storage facility near the village of Tsareva Livada in central Bulgaria overnight into Saturday, September 12, lighting up the night sky and marking the second blaze at a site run by arms manufacturer EMCO in a matter of weeks, according to Reuters.

No injuries were reported. Gabrovo regional governor Kristina Sidorova told journalists early Saturday the fire was "moving from warehouse to warehouse" on the storage base's territory. EMCO production facilities manager Slavcho Dimiev confirmed the site mainly holds ammunition, including a small quantity of medium-caliber rounds.

What Bulgarian officials are saying

Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev told reporters the fire was under control and an investigation was underway. He said authorities "will review previous cases in which similar fires occurred in the warehouses of this company, as well as at other companies, in order to look for a possible connection or a similar pattern."

Demerdzhiev added: "We are not ruling out outside interference." It is not an accusation. It is an acknowledgment that sabotage is one line of inquiry among others, not a conclusion.

Dimiev, the EMCO facilities manager, was more direct about the stakes. "If it is ultimately concluded that they have been targeted, this is not an attack on a particular company alone; it is an attack on the national interest," he said, according to Reuters.

Why Russia comes up

EMCO is run by Bulgarian arms trader Emilian Gebrev. Bulgarian prosecutors have previously alleged Gebrev was the target of attacks by Russian operatives. In 2024, Bulgaria issued arrest warrants for six Russian citizens accused of involvement in destroying EMCO arms depots that stored munitions bound for export to Ukraine and Georgia between 2011 and 2020.

Prosecutors at the time said they had grounds to suspect links between those Bulgarian blasts, an attempted poisoning of Gebrev in 2015, and munitions depot explosions in the Czech Republic in 2014. Moscow has dismissed the allegations. No charges have been filed in connection with Saturday's fire, and Bulgarian authorities have not presented evidence tying it to any foreign actor.

That history is exactly why officials aren't quick to call this an accident and shrug it off. An investigation is open, and as of Saturday it has not produced a public finding either way.

The fair counter-read

Munitions depots catch fire for mundane reasons too. Aging storage infrastructure, handling errors, electrical faults and summer heat have caused ammunition warehouse fires around the world without any foreign hand involved. EMCO's facility held medium-caliber rounds in bulk, the kind of inventory that can ignite from a single spark or malfunction. Two fires at facilities tied to the same company in a short window is suspicious, but it is not proof of a pattern, and Bulgarian officials themselves have stopped short of asserting one.

Where the coverage splits

Reuters' wire reporting, carried by Win Country, ARN News Centre and TRT World, laid out the company name, the location, the named officials, and the 2024 arrest warrants for Russian nationals tied to earlier EMCO attacks. That context matters for understanding why Bulgarian prosecutors treat this pattern seriously.

A separate cluster of coverage, from Crypto Briefing, PrimeXBT and TradingView, stripped almost all of that out. Those pieces described a generic "explosion at a weapons storage facility in Bulgaria," without naming EMCO, Gebrev, the specific village, or the 2024 warrants. PrimeXBT went further, framing the story through a prediction market, stating markets currently price a 22.5% likelihood of a NATO-Russia military clash by the end of 2026. That's a real data point, but it is a speculative market probability, not a reported fact about this fire, and presenting it alongside a stripped-down account of the blast risks making a routine, ongoing investigation sound like confirmed evidence of imminent military escalation. It isn't.

What happens next

Bulgaria's investigation into Saturday's fire is ongoing, with no timeline given for findings. Demerdzhiev said authorities will cross-reference this fire against the August EMCO blaze in western Bulgaria and other past incidents at munitions facilities to look for a pattern. Whether that review produces evidence of sabotage, mechanical failure, or something else remains the open question, and it's the one that will determine whether this becomes a NATO security matter or stays a domestic industrial-accident inquiry.