St Nedelya Church assault

The St Nedelya Church assault was a terrorist attack on St Nedelya Church in Sofia, Bulgaria. It was carried out on 16 April 1925, when a group of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) blew up the church's roof during the funeral service of General Konstantin Georgiev, who had been killed in a previous Communist assault on 14 April. 150 people, mainly from the country's political and military elite, were killed in the attack and around 500 were injured.

After the failure of the September Uprising in 1923 and the prohibition of the BCP by the Bulgarian Supreme Court of Appeal on 2 April 1924, the Communist Party found itself in a difficult situation. The government arrested many activists and the organization's very existence was under threat. A Special Punitive Group was established as part of the Central Committee of the BCP, including Yako Dorosiev, Captain Ivan Minkov and Vulko (or Valko) Chervenkov. The Military Organization (MO) of the BCP, led by Minkov and Major Kosta Yankov, set up small isolated groups ("шесторки", "shestorki") that carried out individual attacks. This, however, did not prevent the police from discovering and destroying the illegal structures of the BCP with relative ease.

Later, in December 1924, the organization recruited Petar Zadgorski, a sexton at the church. Dimitar Hadzhidimitrov and Dimitar Zlatarev, head of the MO armaments section, suggested that Police Director Vladimir Nachev be assassinated and a large-scale assault be carried out during his funeral service. In this way they hoped to eliminate a large number of key figures in the police hierarchy and thus lessen the pressure that the authorities exerted on the BCP. The idea was welcomed by Stanke Dimitrov, Secretary of the Central Committee, who discussed it with Georgi Dimitrov and Vasil Kolarov, General Secretary of the Comintern, in early 1925. Nevertheless, they did not approve the proposal, as they thought such an action should first be preceded by preparations for a large-scale uprising that would follow the attack.

Meanwhile, the government continued to increase its pressure on the BCP. Following the killing of Valcho Ivanov, an influential functionary, on 11 February 1925, an amendment to the Law for the Protection of the State which increased the power of the authorities was introduced on 10 March. Yako Dorosiev, head of the MO, was then assassinated on 26 March. These events threatened the physical survival of the BCP leaders and angered the MO leadership. They announced that they were ready to put their plan into practice despite the Comintern's disapproval. It has been theorized that the assailants acted with the support of Soviet services, but there is no documentary evidence to support this hypothesis.

...
Wikipedia