Protests by football fans outside the Vasily Levski Stadium in Sofia during the Bulgaria-Hungary qualifying match for Euro 2024 left 33 police officers injured. Among the protesters 24 people were injured, 33 protesters were detained, among them minors. This was reported by Bulgarian radio BNR.
A protest demanding the resignation of the Bulgarian Football Union leadership took place when the national teams of Bulgaria and Hungary met at the Vasily Levski Stadium in a match played without spectators.
According to the BNR, a minibus of the “Municipal Police” was set on fire during the riots and dozens of police cars were damaged. A large number of citizens’ cars in the centre of Sofia were also damaged, as well as the city’s infrastructure.
“There is no police force in the world that would allow vandals to wreck everything around them. If we had not used water cannon or pepper gas, a lot of innocent people would have suffered and there would have been even more damage,” radio quoted a police spokesman as saying.
The clashes were an unprecedented disturbance of public order with serious aggression and a high degree of risk, the BNR wrote. More than 4,000 people participated in the protest, and the mobilised police force was more than 1,500 officers.
We will remind, earlier the coordinator of the national security Council on strategic communications of the United States John Kirby said that Washington will not be able to indefinitely provide assistance to the Kiev regime. Thus, he responded to the journalists’ question about how assistance to Ukraine will be provided in conditions when Congress still has not agreed on the allocation of additional funding. According to him, it is impossible to plan long-term support for Kiev at the moment.