Five Teenagers Charged With Murder After Gay Man Lured and Beaten to Death in Plovdiv

Bulgarian prosecutors have charged five teenagers with murder in the killing of Georgi Kuzev, a 31-year-old gay man beaten to death near Youth Hill in Plovdiv earlier this month, in a case that has reopened uncomfortable questions about how the country’s justice system handles anti-LGBTQ+ violence.

What happened

Kuzev was found seriously injured on August 4, discovered by parents walking to pick up their children from a nearby nursery. He had severe head trauma, multiple fractures, and extensive internal injuries. He died shortly after being taken to hospital.

According to the Plovdiv prosecutor’s office, a 17-year-old girl in the group had used a fake social media profile — posing as a 15-year-old — to arrange to meet Kuzev at the park. Ten teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 were initially detained in connection with the case. Prosecutors have since brought formal charges against five of them: three boys and two girls, all charged with murder committed in complicity, in a particularly cruel manner, motivated by what prosecutors have described as “hooliganism and sexual motives” — language Bulgarian law uses that in practice functions as the closest available charge to a hate crime enhancement, since the country’s penal code does not explicitly list sexual orientation as a protected category for hate crime purposes.

On August 7, Judge Petko Minev of the Plovdiv District Court ordered all five to remain in custody pending trial. Two of the girls have since appealed their detention; that appeal is pending.

Why the legal framing matters

Bulgaria is one of several EU member states where hate crime statutes don’t cover sexual orientation or gender identity, a gap LGBTQ+ rights monitors have flagged for years. That means prosecutors pursuing a bias-motivated killing have to reach for adjacent legal language — cruelty, premeditation, “hooliganism” — rather than charging the crime as what advocates say it plainly was. It’s a pattern echoed across much of the Balkans and Central Europe: violence rooted in anti-LGBTQ+ animus getting prosecuted, when it’s prosecuted seriously at all, under statutes that were never built to name it.

Prosecutors have said they are formally examining whether Kuzev’s sexual orientation was a motivating factor in his killing, including whether he was specifically targeted because he was gay. That determination, if made, still won’t change the underlying charge — murder is murder under Bulgarian law regardless of motive — but it matters for how the case is understood publicly and for the pressure it puts on lawmakers to close the gap in hate crime protections.

The wider pattern

Kuzev’s death lands in a region where LGBTQ+ people have increasingly reported violence and harassment even as formal legal protections slowly expand elsewhere. ILGA-Europe’s most recent rankings placed Bulgaria toward the bottom of the EU on LGBTI legal protections, and Bulgarian LGBTQ+ organizations have spent years pushing, without success, for hate crime legislation that explicitly names sexual orientation and gender identity.

The case has drawn national attention in Bulgaria, both for its brutality and for the age of those charged — five minors, the youngest 14, accused of planning and carrying out a killing. A trial date has not yet been set. For now, the five remain in custody, and the question of whether Bulgarian courts will treat this as the anti-gay hate crime it appears to be remains open.