At around 23:00 local time (20:00 UTC) on September 11, 2026, a fire broke out at an EMCO ammunition depot near Gorni Varpishta, a village in Dryanovo Municipality in Gabrovo Province, central Bulgaria, according to Bulgaria's national news agency BTA, citing the Gabrovo District Prosecution Office. The fire was brought under control promptly, Interior Minister Ivan Demerdzhiev said. There were no casualties; employees on site were evacuated and nearby residents were placed under a BG-ALERT notice as a precaution.
Only one depot caught fire, the interior minister says, and EMCO calls it sabotage
Demerdzhiev told reporters that isolated fires following the night's explosions at EMCO's depots near Gorni Varpishta were not spreading: only one depot had caught fire, the other depots on the site were not at risk, and there was no danger of the fire spreading beyond it. Gabrovo District Prosecutor Petkov said no hypothesis had yet been ruled out or confirmed.
EMCO took a firmer public line. The company said the September 11 incident "is no exception to the series of acts of sabotage against the Bulgarian defence industry," and separately told The Sofia Globe the blast was sabotage and that state authorities are failing to do their job competently. Bulgarian authorities have not adopted EMCO's framing; the Gabrovo District Prosecution Office has opened pre-trial proceedings into "a criminal offense related to a fire," without naming a cause. Investigators have questioned an eyewitness, cordoned the scene until counter-terrorism units can clear it, requested warehouse-contents and movement records, ordered an expert fire-cause examination, and assigned an investigating magistrate.
President Iliana Iotova said she would decide in the coming days whether to convene a National Security Council meeting over the fire.
The second EMCO explosion in a month
Gorni Varpishta is EMCO's second depot fire in just over a month. On August 10, 2026, a truck fire spread into warehouses at EMCO's Tryavna plant near Belitsa, also in Gabrovo Province, triggering explosions but no casualties - an earlier ammunition-plant fire Bulgarian prosecutors investigated for a possible link to a wider pattern of blasts dating back to 2011.
EMCO is one of Bulgaria's largest private defence manufacturers. It produces and repairs artillery and tank ammunition in calibres that overlap with those still used by Ukrainian forces, a role that has put its facilities under repeated scrutiny as Bulgaria's ammunition-manufacturing base takes on added weight supplying the war. Whether Gorni Varpishta belongs in that pattern, as EMCO itself now asserts, or is the accident Demerdzhiev's carefully open language leaves room for, is a question the Gabrovo investigation has not yet answered.
Wind conditions over Gorni Varpishta
At 20:00 UTC on 11 September, close to the fire's start, the 80 m surface layer over Gorni Varpishta showed wind pushing south at 9.9 km/h. At 2,000 m the flow shifted to push east at 6.5 km/h; at 3,000 m it turned to push northwest at 9 km/h. This reconstruction is based on reporting by BTA and The Sofia Globe, and on AirVeto's wind-model data for the event window. How AirVeto builds this field, and where it is reliable, is described on the methodology page.