Indignation in Bulgaria after a similar case with the asylums of horror in Romania: 75 the elderly were found connected and sedated / “A total lack of humanity”
Police car in Bulgaria, photo: Artur Widak / Nurphoto / Shutterstock Editorial / Profimedia
The Bulgarian population is shocked by the inhuman treatment applied to the elderly people from two illegal asylums in the country, after they were abolished by the authorities, who were forced to hospitalize some of the elderly due to the serious deterioration of their health, informs EFE, taken over by Agerpres.
Of the total of 75 people saved, 11 are in “serious condition”, and a victim had to amputate a segment from a foot, said the Minister of Justice Gheorghi Gheorghiev for Nova TV.
Six people were arrested on Saturday, during an operation of the exhaust police with the force of two units in the town of Iagoda, in the center of the country, where the owners offered for rent rooms to evade ordinary sanitary inspections in the elderly.
The authorities issued 75 men and women between the ages of 51 and 85, which they found and sedated under more than miserable conditions, “who violate all human rights,” Gheorghiev stressed, referring to the two centers as “homes of horror”.
“The doors were locked, the window handles were destroyed from the inside, the hygiene conditions were terrible and there was no bed linen,” the minister described.
The mobile phones of the patients in these centers had been confiscated and no contact with the outside world were allowed. In addition, they had no identity document.
“There was no permanent medical care; the doctor came only when someone was dying. People without the necessary qualification injected drugs. One of the patients said he managed to run in two occasions, but was brought back,” the minister continued.
Gheorghiev denounced “a total lack of humanity and an unexplained sadistic attitude” by the responsible, which the hospitalized-many of them suffering from dementia and other diseases that did not allow them to take care of themselves-were completely addicted.
Most of them – 44 – were now hosted in municipal and state institutions in the cities of Stara Zagora, Kazanlak and Sliven, while another 20 were received by their families, the minister said. The authorities, who have opened an investigation, do not exclude more arrests.
This case reminds of the “asylums of horror”, the scandal that appeared in the summer of 2023 in Romania in which the prosecutors sent 28 people, including the former driver of Gabriele Firea, Stefan Godei, and the two legal entities that administered the so-called care centers for the elderly and persons.
