Bulgaria sentences Australian to 4 years for terror links

A 21-year-old Australian man with dual Australian-Bulgarian citizenship will spend the next four years in jail in Bulgaria for supposed terrorist links.

John Zakhariev and his lawyer dispute the verdict.

There was no jury; a judge heard secret testimony and ruled.

The case is tricky. Zakhariev admittedly traveled to Syria after graduating from an Australian private school in 29013, and there stayed with a Jihadist group.

This past September his father, Svetlomir Zakhariev said John converted to Islam because he was disgusted with Christianity after learning about the Catholic Church’s issues with pedophilia. His father claimed John later switched back. His father has since died.

After leaving Syria Zakhariev moved to Sofia, where his father had lived.

In Sofia he went to a gun range several times with another man, supposedly to train using a Kalashnikov rifle, so he would be able to fight for in Syria.

The person training him was a Bulgarian agent.

Zakhariev claims entrapment.

“Nothing has been proven in the course of seven months of the court proceedings,” Zakhariev said. “They have not proven one time that I intended to return to Syria, they have provided no evidence I went shooting with the intention to go back to Syria, nor have they provided any evidence to show any links or sympathies with ISIS or DAESH. Like I said, nothing more could be expected from a country which still runs show trials and which denied me to even have a defense in court.”

It seems equally possible that Zakhariev was a spoiled, dissatisfied, intelligent but emotionally unrooted teenager who acted rationally in seeking a group to belong to, or that Bulgaria found out that he was vulnerable and had a questionable history and decided to tempt him into a misstep.

Zakhariev is now petitioning to serve his sentence in an Australian prison.