[More than 200 died, and more than 500 were injured, after Communists’ bomb brought down the dome of St Nedelya Cathedral, Sofia, during the funeral of the assassinated General Georgiev (News, 17 April).]
ASSASSINATION is a regular incident of politics in the Balkans, and the horrible bomb outrage in Sofia Cathedral is only the latest, if the worst, example of the methods of barbarism familiar in the Near East. It is alleged that the Sofia crime was the work of agents of the Communist International, which is directed from Moscow by Zinovieff, but this is discredited by the reliable Vienna correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. Revolution is native in Bulgaria, and the Bulgarian Government has successfully used the menace of Moscow to obtain permission from the Ambassador’s Council to increase its army by 10,000 men. Meanwhile, according to Colonel Wedgwood, who has been in Sofia, there is a reign of terror in the Bulgarian capital, and the English Minister has pleaded with the authorities for a more humane treatment of the batches of prisoners that they are making. It is, we believe, Yugo-Slavia rather than Russia that Bulgaria fears. The present condition of affairs in Sofia is a reminder that another Balkan war is something more than a possibility, and when once a war begins in the Balkans, it may, as we know well, spread all over the Continent.
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