KING OF BULGARIA

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 August 1943, Page 3

KING OF BULGARIA

DEATH IN MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES SOME REPORTS ALLEGE ASSASSINATION. FEARS OF BALKAN CRISIS. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, August 28 The death occurred of King Boris of Bulgaria, this afternoon. According to the German overseas news agency it was due to heart and lung troubles. The successor to the Bulgarian throne is King Boris’s six-year-old son, who has been proclaimed Simeon 11.

According to the Bulgarian radio, a council of Ministers headed by the Prime Minister, Professor Filoff, will assume full control of the country till the appointment of a Regency council of three demanded under the constitution till the young King reaches his eighteenth birthday. An earlier message said King Boris fell ill at Hitler’s headquarters, and was removed to Sofia by ambulance train.

(Quoting a reliable Balkan source, the “New York Times” Berne correspondent says King Boris was shot in the abdomen three times as he was entering his motor-car at a small station outside the capital after returning by special train from Hitler’s field headquarters. The shots were fired by a pro-Russian police inspector. The Berlin radio, referring to the death of King Boris, said: “The nation’s grief is immeasurable. It is the sacred duty of all to fulfil his legacy and continue on the path he has shown us united and unswerving” Reuter’s diplomatic correspondent says: “Germany will have to take stronger measures to avert an upheaval in Bulgaria King Boris’s death might of itself provoke a crisis. Since the outbreak of the war he played a subtle game. His adherence to the Tripartite Pack paved the way for the German onslaught on Greece and Yugoslavia. “The reward was aggrandisement for Bulgaria by the addition of parts of Dobruja from Rumania, Macedonia from Yugoslavia, and Thrace from Greece. However, King Boris resisted all Hitler’s attempts to induce him to send troops to Russia, Recently King Boris, like other Balkan satellites, was trying to get a foothold in the Allied :amp.”