Guns, a blonde and police provocateurs: how John Zahariev ended up in a Bulgarian jail and set free

Former Sydney schoolboy John Zahariev is free after he went to jail in Bulgaria. This is how he was caught by guns, a “honey-trap’’ and police provocateurs.

Sydney man John Zahariev was convictedof terrorism offences and jailed in Bulgaria. Picture: Supplied by News Corp Australia UK Bureau.

The trial and conviction of former Sydney schoolboy John Zahariev in 2017 hinged on what his motivations were when he visited shooting ranges in Bulgaria and learned how to fire a Kalashnikov automatic rifle.

The prosecution argued that he was training for a terror attack, under instruction from Islamic State after he visited Syria for eight days in 2013.

Zahariev disputed this, saying he was “absolutely not’’ a terrorist. His father and supporters argued he had been set up by mysterious police provocateurs – and an attractive blonde by the name of Kristina Georgieva.

A skilled recreational shooter and an early social media influencer, Ms Georgieva met Zahariev outside his hotel in the tourist town of Plovdiv, where the pair happened to get talking. She spoke English. They discovered their mutual interest in shooting and agreed to take a taxi together to a local shooting range which Ms Georgieva knew.

The prosecution claimed their meeting was a coincidence.

Zahariev’s supporters claimed it was a honey-trap.

Australian-Bulgarian John Zahariev appears in court in Bulgaria.

The judge sitting in the Sofia Special Criminal Court preferred the prosecution’s arguments, and sentenced Zahariev, then aged just 21, to four years in jail after finding him guilty of training as a terrorist with the intention of carrying out a terrorist act. It was half the maximum eight-year-term he could have faced, and was later cut on appeal to 2.5 years.

He’s since been released from jail.

His Bulgarian lawyer said he was in neither Bulgaria nor Australia.

His family lives in Balmain, in Sydney.

He may have been released as early as 2019.

The skinny, baby-faced former Catholic schoolboy had arrived in Bulgaria in 2016, to live with his father, Svetlomir Zahariev, a Bulgarian citizen.

Kristina Georgieva is a top Bulgarian recreational shooter. Picture: Maritsa Daily.

He’d had a privileged early life, born in Vietnam to local woman Anne Ngo. His father was much older, a wealthy diplomat who worked for the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation. The family moved to Sydney to raise their three young children, and Zahariev, an Australian citizen, attended the all-boys Waverley College, graduating in 2012. A gun enthusiast, he spent four years in the Australian Army cadet corp.

His now-deceased father was strong-willed and domineering and told Bulgarian TV station Nova he had intervened several times when his son began forming relationships with girls in his teens, because he didn’t approve.

John Zahariev appears in court in Bulgaria on terrorism charges.

An anxious teenager and young man, Zahariev struggled to make friends, and eventually found companionship online discussing world affairs with a group of young Muslim men from Sydney’s west. The group befriended Zahariev and spent hours online discussing the war in Syria. The group Zahariev was talking to was connected to Street Dawah, a radical Islamist street preaching group from Parramatta that was under close scrutiny by Australian police and intelligence agencies.

Zahariev felt he’d formed a brotherhood bond with his unnamed friends online.

“These words just got into his heart,’’ his father told Nova TV.

Kristina Georgieva is a top Bulgarian recreational shooter. Picture: Maritsa Daily.

“He told me: ‘Now I finally have brothers, who are always ready to help me. He started to trust them 100 per cent. They called him brother, he started calling them brothers too.’’

Street Dawah was led by Islamic State recruiter Mohammad Ali Baryalei, and ASIO, the Australian Federal Police and New South Wales police were monitoring him closely. A former Kings Cross bouncer, who had a bit part in the TV crime series Underbelly, Baryalei was accused of involvement in a terror plot in early 2014, and there are unverified reports he was killed in October that same year in the Middle East.

Mohammad Ali Baryalei, the former leader of Street Dawah and a recruiter for Islamic State.

Disgusted by the endless stream of revelations relating to Catholic priests and paedophilia, Zahariev had renounced the religion he’d been raised in, and converted to Islam. Lost and unable to find a purpose, he did some travel, including making a brief trip to Syria in 2013 before returning to Australia and enrolling at the University of Sydney.

Zahariev continued to talk to his Street Dawah mates, and was stopped by ASIO at Sydney Airport in 2015 when he tried to fly overseas, with his passport briefly seized, before it was returned a few weeks later.

The scrutiny was mounting on Zahariev, and when his father moved to Bulgaria to live out his final years, he decided to join him there in 2016, moving into his flat in the capital Sofia.

Australian police, along with the FBI, tipped off the Bulgarian police about him, and they raided the Zahariev flat in September 2016, arresting John and taking him to Sofia Central Prison. Svetlomir, now aged in his 80s and frail, suffered a fall at home a few months later, and later died in hospital.

The top-right apartment in the Hadji Dimitar district of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, where John Zahariev was arrested in a police raid on September 20, 2016. Picture: Supplied

John Zahariev vehemently denied being a terrorist and accused Australia of “selling’’ him to the Bulgarians.

“What kind of a terrorist am I?’’ he said in a courtroom interview after his arrest.

“When they raided my apartment they found absolutely nothing, just religious material which even a previous expert said was normal religious material.’’

In court, Zahariev said his trip to Syria was for humanitarian purposes. “I wanted to go to see what the situation was, to see what I could do to help the Syrian people,” he said.

Prosecutor Evgeniya Stankova said the evidence showed Zahariev was training as a terrorist with the intent to return to Syria and carry out attacks.

She said the goal of the visits to the shooting ranges was to train him as a terrorist, and train him to shoot with Kalashnikovs.

Ms Stankova also said the reason Zahariev returned from Syria after just eight days in 2013 was because he was not well-trained in combat.

A short walk from the Zahariev apartment is a public shooting range called Levski, in the bottom of a stadium named after Georgi Asparunhov, Bulgaria’s greatest-ever football player. John Zahariev spent time practising here in 2016 with several men, never named publicly, described by Zahariev’s father as “police provocateurs.’’

“The terror charges are the result of police provocateurs who were very successfully instilled in our family,’’ Svetlomir Zahariev said.

“These police provocateurs offered to take him here (to the shooting range in Sofia), they offered to train him shooting and now doom him with what they call “evidence”.

“They told him: ‘You want to shoot? No problem. We will take you to a place nearby.’’

The Levski shooting range in Sofia, Bulgaria, another range where John Zahariev went shooting before he was arrested. It is in walking distance from his father's apartment where he was arrested. Picture: Supplied

John Zahariev told the court he had become disillusioned with his Facebook friends and renounced Islam, returning to Christianity by mid-2016.

However, he continued to shoot at ranges, and in August, travelled to Plovdiv, a tourist town in central Bulgaria.

That’s where he met Ms Georgieva, outside his hotel.

After this apparently coincidental meeting, the pair travelled in a taxi together to the 360 Degree Shooting and Training Centre, in the village of Voyvodinovo, outside Plovdiv town.

Ms Georgieva told the court she met Zahariev outside his hotel “by chance’’ and discovered their mutual interest in shooting. She was a member of the club that used the 360 shooting centre and invited him for a visit.

A screenshot of the website of the 360 Degrees Shooting and Training Centre in Bulgaria. where John Zahariev went to shoot while in Bulgaria. Picture: Supplied

Bulgarian media reports of her testimony state that she told the court Zahariev wanted to shoot with a Kalashnikov, and as she was not experienced with this weapon, she called an instructor to help.

The reports say Zahariev dropped bullets on the ground, which was unusual, and wanted to take some as souvenirs, which was not permitted.

Zahariev told the court he did not know how to shoot a Kalashnikov, had never trained with it and was so inexperienced he needed help from an instructor.

He later spoke of his trauma at being incarcerated at the bleak Sofia Central Prison, where he befriended the only other known Australia there, Jock Palfreeman, also of Sydney, who spent 13 years there are being arrested with murdering a local man in a street fight in central Sofia in 2007.

“Prison? That place is the heart of darkness, nobody goes into that place and stays for longer than a year without having … some sort of psychological trauma,” John Zahariev said.

Zahariev’s Bulgarian lawyer Hristo Botev declined to make further comments on his release.