The three police officers from Kochani have been found guilty in the Pulse nightclub fire trial. On Tuesday, Kire Bogatinov and Goran Lazarov were each issued a suspended sentence of one year, while Kochani Police Station Commander Aleksandar Temelkov was given a two-year suspended sentence.
The defendants will not be imprisoned if they do not commit a new criminal offense within a period of four years. Neither they nor their attorneys were present at Tuesday’s announcement of the first-instance verdict.
The Criminal Court stated that it considered as mitigating circumstances the fact that the defendants had no prior convictions, that they were family men, and that their actions hadn’t resulted in immediate harmful consequences that could be brought into a direct causal link to the fire.
According to the verdict, Bogatinov and Lazarov failed to determine which legal entity was performing the activity at the nightclub and entered data that were not from official documents.
Regarding Commander Temelkov, the Court has established that he possessed data about the license, but despite that, he approved a procedure against an entity that was not performing the activity. The sentence was fiercely criticized by the parents of those killed in the fire.