JOHANNESBURG—On the morning of May 25, a volley of gunshots rang out in Constantia suburb of Cape Town. The suburb is home to some of South Africa’s wealthiest people, including business magnates and politicians.
It was also home to a married couple who a neighbor later described as “very quiet; from somewhere in Europe.”
No one knew much about them; they kept to themselves, was the common description of the man and woman whose bullet-riddled bodies—along with those of a man later described as their bodyguard and a woman who worked as their housekeeper—were found in a black luxury SUV in the driveway of their mansion.
Police confirmed the four were “Bulgarian nationals aged between 40 and 50.”
South African Police Service (SAPS) officers gather at a house in the Bryanston suburb of Johannesburg, on Nov. 17, 2022, following the arrest of a 46-year-old Israeli fugitive who has been the subject of an Interpol red notice since 2015. AFP via Getty Images
Two of the deceased were later identified as Krasimir Nikolaev Kamenov, 55, also known as “Kuro,” and his wife Gergana, 47.
The murders remain unsolved, but international law enforcement agencies believe Mr. Kamenov was the main target of the “hit.”
Interpol had placed him under a Red Notice for most wanted international fugitives in April.
Mr. Kamenov’s alleged crimes included murder, narcotics trafficking, and extortion, with Bulgarian police describing him as the country’s “most wanted crime boss” and former leader of a Bulgarian crime syndicate called VIS-2.
Mr. Kamenov also was suspected of ordering the killing of a former police officer in Sofia, Bulgaria, in March 2022.
About six weeks before he was killed in Cape Town, the Prosecutor’s Office of Bulgaria publicly announced that he had a “probable residence in South Africa,” and was allegedly central to a plot to “remove” senior police officers and prosecutors investigating his activities in his home country.
The office described the alleged plot as a “threat to Bulgaria’s national security.”
“Obviously as a high-profile underworld figure, you’d expect Kamenov to have many enemies, so the list of suspects in his murder is probably a long one,” said Chad Thomas, a Johannesburg-based private investigator and organized crime expert.
One of those enemies might have been compatriot Ruja Ignatova, who’s on the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives list.
Ms. Ignatova, 42, is known internationally as the “Cryptoqueen” after allegedly using a fake cryptocurrency scheme to defraud victims around the world of about $4 billion.
She co-founded OneCoin in 2014 along with a Swedish national, Karl Sebastian Greenwood, who pleaded guilty in New York to fraud and money-laundering charges in December last year.
But Ms. Ignatova’s whereabouts remain unknown, and the FBI is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to her arrest.
A day after Mr. Kamenov was shot dead, the Bureau of Investigative Reporting and Data in Bulgaria, a partner of the global Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, said he had been about to provide information to law enforcement about Ms. Ignatova.
She vanished in October 2017, after apparently being informed that police were investigating her alleged scam.
Mr. Thomas said Ms. Ignatova’s younger brother, Konstantin Ignatov, then assumed control of OneCoin, making frequent visits to Cape Town until early 2019.
“It’s not known what he [Konstantin] was doing in Cape Town in this period,“ Mr. Thomas said. ”But I think it’s safe to say that he wasn’t there to climb Table Mountain, and it points to the fact that the Bulgarian mafia is firmly established in South Africa.”
Mr. Ignatov was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport in March 2019 on multiple charges related to OneCoin.
In a statement at the time, Geoffrey Berman, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said Mr. Ignatov and others “created a multibillion-dollar ‘cryptocurrency’ company based completely on lies and deceit.
“They promised big returns and minimal risk but, as alleged, this business was a pyramid scheme based on smoke and mirrors more than zeroes and ones. Investors were victimized while the defendants got rich.”
In February, Mr. Ignatov was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in the OneCoin fraud.
When he was arrested at the airport, Mr. Ignatov was with Duncan Arthur, a banker with dual South African and Irish nationality.
Mr. Arthur previously held senior posts at several leading South African financial institutions.
In February, in an affidavit to Bulgaria’s Department of Justice, Mr. Arthur wrote that Ms. Ignatova had “personally recruited” him in 2016 as OneCoin’s chief compliance officer.
Mr. Arthur, who hasn’t been charged with any crime, wrote, “I visited OneCoin headquarters in Sofia [Bulgaria] many times and had meetings there with Ruja Ignatova, Konstantin Ignatov, [their mother] Veska Ignatova, and their lawyer, Irina Dilkinska.”
The slaying of Mr. Kamenov also came just weeks after the Bulgarian prosecutors released video and audio recordings implicating him and several government officials in a plan to “capture the state.”
In December 2022, U.S. Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, wrote to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, warning her that corruption occurring in Bulgaria could harm U.S. interests.
Mr. Davidson also warned that “Bulgarian critical infrastructure and defense companies are routinely transferred to Russian-sanctioned banks and other corrupt elements in spite of sanctions.”
In February, the U.S. government sanctioned several Bulgarian political figures.
The Treasury Department issued a statement in April saying the sanctions were evidence of “the extent [in Bulgaria] to which corruption has become entrenched across ministries, parties, and state-owned industries ...”
The department suggested that the alleged plan by organized crime groups to seize control of key state institutions in Bulgaria, to facilitate corruption and prevent investigations into crimes, was in large part hatched in the United States.
A section of the statement reads: “Part of the collected evidence [was] presented, from which it was established that persons subject to investigations, defendants, and others, held meetings and conversations with the aim of organizing a campaign in the USA, in member states of the European Union and on the territory of the country [Bulgaria] to discredit the activities of law enforcement authorities, including taking actions that would compromise and remove senior magistrates and police officers.”
Mr. Thomas said Mr. Kamenov’s presence in South Africa, and subsequent slaying, was unsurprising because the country had become known in global organized crime circles as a “safe haven, especially in the past 15 years” or so.
“The government [run by the African National Congress] has allowed organized crime to flourish, and top ANC officials are themselves [allegedly] involved in organized crime,” he stated.
“Its corruption and lax laws, along with the country’s good telecommunications and banking networks, plus excellent places for the rich to live and party, make it a great place for underworld figures to base themselves.”
Lizette Lancaster, an organized crime expert at South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies, said: “State incompetence and suspected collaboration” means that most of the world’s best-known mafia groups now have a presence in the country.
“That’s why we’re seeing more and more ‘hits’ and contract killings involving global crime figures on South African territory,” she said.
In April, the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime released a report about the growing prevalence of “high-profile” assassinations in South Africa, saying there were at least two per week.
“Our local police don’t have the resources and the required skills to investigate and solve these kinds of murders,“ Ms. Lancaster stated. ”And the criminals know that.”
