The brutal murder of 37-year-old Georgi Kuzev on the Youth Hill in Plovdiv provoked public figure and musician Evgeniy Dainov to share a bitter personal memory of a group violence he experienced in the past. On his social media profile, he drew a parallel between the aggression against him in his youth and the fatal end of the man in the city under the hills.
The violence against the man in Plovdiv, for which five minors are accused, has triggered Dainov's memories of an incident with a similar profile of the perpetrators. He tells how years ago he fell into the hands of a group of young men and was kicked in the head simply because of the way he looked.
„A very long time ago, a group of 6 football hooligans kicked me in the head because I was a “hippie“. It wasn't very pleasant. They left me alive, right? Maybe I should be grateful to them“, Dainov wrote on his profile.
The similarities between the two stories lie in the group violence and the search for a specific reason to turn the victim into a target. While the musician was attacked because of his appearance and his labeling as a “hippie“, during the court hearings in the case in Plovdiv it became clear that the accused young men experienced themselves as “pedophile hunters“. They perceived the 37-year-old man precisely through this prism, subjecting him to prolonged beatings and humiliations that ultimately led to his death.