Girls from the village of Ribnovo, in Saudi Arabian attire, are pictured after taking a class on radical Islam. Photo by BGNES

Despite Bulgaria's European Union membership, some regions of the country need a second liberation from Ottoman yoke, the Bulgarian Member of the Parliament (MP), Yane Yanev, stated, cited by the Bulgarian news agency, BGNES.

Yanev, who is the leader of the opposition "Order, Law, Justice" Party (RZS) spoke Monday in Blagoevgrad as reported by the local BGNES correspondent.

The leaders of RZS visited Monday several villages in Southern Bulgaria to meet with alarmed teachers and parents, who have presented concrete evidence of the imposed conversion to fundamentalist Islam in the region.

The example of the village of Ribnovo, in the Gurmen municipality, has been presented as the most striking one. In Ribnovo, the school principal, Feim Issa, had imposed full dictatorship on the teaching staff, forcing them to wear traditional Muslim clothes, and encouraging female student to the same. Issa has been illegally appointed as principal with help of the local mosque's leaders and is actively supporting the religion teacher at the school, Murat Boshnak. Boshnak is, reportedly, an individual with suspicious past and unclear educational background. He is not holding even a Bulgarian high school diploma, but has graduated from a religious school in Skopje, Macedonia. Ribnovo residents allege that Boshnak has specialized in Saudi Arabia and is forcefully making parents to sign requests for their children to study the Islam. He is also demanding that children address him as "aga' instead of "gospodin" (Mister), had prohibited girls from attending the last prom in civil attire and issued a ban on celebrations. Boshnak later organized a trip to Turkey with funds from an Arab foundation. Only one girl had attended the prom. Parents, who refuse to follow the fundamentalist rules, are being cursed during services in the local mosque. 

Yanev had established similar examples in the village of Satovcha, where the school principal regularly attended classes in radical Islamism in an illegal local fundamentalist school. The principal was currently on maternity leave and, in order to keep the school under control, had appointed her own husband to replace her.

The residents of the villages visited by Yanev are not Turks; they are all Bulgarian-Muslims, speaking only Bulgarian language. 

The RZS leader stated he was appalled by the extreme violations of the rights and freedoms of Bulgarian citizens, embedded in the Constitution. RZS distributed to the media video postcards, showing how radical Islam is quickly taking roots in the country, under the courteous watch of the ruling tri-party Coalition.

Yanev and his colleague Dimitar Abadzhiev vowed to signal the State Agency for National Security (DANS) about the citizens' rights violations in the region, which, they say, are sabotaging European values and leading the way of Islam in Europe.