Slavi Binev, former MEP and European taekwondo champion, shot dead: three arrested after the shooting in Sofia

Slavi Binev, a former member of the European Parliament, businessman and one-time European taekwondo champion, was shot dead yesterday morning at his house in Sofia's Pavlovo neighbourhood. Police received the report of the shooting at around 10:20. Paramedics arrived within seven minutes, but doctors could only pronounce him dead. There was a single gunshot wound to the head.

The killing was reported by a worker who was in the house. According to his statement, several people came onto the property, after which shots were heard. When he went to check, he found Binev dead. Around an hour later, on the Trakia motorway near the Trajan's Gate tunnel, police arrested three men suspected of the killing.

Lyubomir Nikolov, secretary general of Bulgaria's Interior Ministry, said the arrested men knew Binev and had visited his house before. Two pistols were found on them, one of which had been thrown out of the vehicle just before they were stopped. According to initial information, the men worked in construction, and police are looking into the possibility that the killing stemmed from unsettled financial dealings. Nikolov said there is so far no evidence that it was a contract killing. The Sofia City Prosecutor's Office has opened an investigation.

From the mat, through the nightclubs, to Brussels

Binev's biography is almost a textbook of the Bulgarian transition. Born in Sofia in 1965, he became European taekwondo champion in Celje in 1992. He later served as president of the Bulgarian Taekwondo Federation and first vice-president of the European Taekwondo Union. In the nineties and two-thousands he built a business in security, construction and entertainment and ran a string of popular nightclubs in Sofia. For years the media linked him to the organised crime groups that sprang up during the transition.

He entered politics through the nationalist party Ataka, on whose list he became an MEP in 2007, winning a second term in 2009. In 2007 he also ran for mayor of Sofia. He left Ataka in 2011, founded his own party, and in 2014 entered the Bulgarian parliament with the National Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria. His election as chair of the parliamentary Committee on Culture and Media sparked protests in cultural circles, and he resigned in December 2014. In the 2017 elections he was on the DPS list.

If the investigation confirms the initial motive, three men who knew him and used to visit his home decided to settle a dispute over money with a pistol. That is the story the prosecution now has to prove. But the second question remains, one the Balkans know well: how did a man who spent years in the headlines over links to the underworld make it to the European Parliament twice - and how many biographies like that are still sitting in institutions across the region?