The excitement during the outgoing week over the appointment of a new central bank governor and the political and institutional bickering over whether the constitution should be amended or not in connection with the long-awaited reform in the judicial system, seem to have overshadowed two pieces of news which sound truly disturbing in terms of Bulgaria’s security.

On Wednesday the Interior Ministry announced that a young Syrian national, living in Bulgaria for over 20 years had been arrested; he was a member of the hacker group MECA – the Middle East Cyber Army, a group with Islamic State connections. MECA had been commissioned by Islamic State to hack more than 3,500 government and corporate websites in all parts of the world. From Bulgaria, the young man had used encrypted lines to keep in contact with other hackers scattered around the world.

Again on Wednesday, the Interior Ministry made a second announcement – that a Syrian and an Afghan national had been detained in Sofia.The Syrian, a resident of Bulgaria for 30 years was a member of a human trafficking group from the Middle East to Western Europe via the territory of Bulgaria, the so-called coyotes. The Afghan national was with connections to the Taliban movement.

So what makes these two items of news so disturbing? The arrest of the hacker is the first instance of someone from the Middle East who has lived and studied in this country to have been unmasked as a supporter of the terrorist organization Islamic State. He may not be a fighter, ready to exterminate anyone not professing radical Islam - organizations such as these have their henchmen but they also need other kinds of followers. The logical question arises: now that a hacker working for Islamic State has been identified in Bulgaria, isn’t it possible there might be an Islamic State sleeper cell in the country as well? Something experts are not ruling out.

As to the Syrian human trafficker, the question is whether Bulgarian officials from structures whose job it is to guard the country’s borders haven’t kept an umbrella open over this lucrative business, for money of course. Because illegal migrant trafficking pipelines and “coyotes” are things we have been hearing about for a long time - since last year when the migrant pressure along Bulgaria’s border with Turkey soared - and it would be difficult to believe that the Interior Ministry has not been able to cope with the problem all this time. An analysis by the National Intelligence Service made public last year predicted that there would be more terrorist threats to Bulgaria in 2015, one of the reasons being Al-Qaeda’s intention to pick up its activities in face of the competition from Islamic State. According to the same report the flows of refugees and illegal immigrants towards and via Bulgaria will increase. We can only hope that Interior Ministry officials have read this report in earnest and… in time.

English version: Milena Daynova