Pavel Shatev

Pavel Potsev Shatev (Bulgarian and Macedonian: Павел Поцев Шатев) (1882–1951) was a Bulgarian revolutionary and member of the left wing of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (IMARO), later becoming a left-wing political activist. He is considered ethnic Macedonian in the Republic of Macedonia.

Biography

Born in Kratovo, in the Kosovo Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire (present-day Republic of Macedonia), Shatev graduated from the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki. At first he participated in a group that make plans for a bomb attack in Istanbul. In 1900 the Ottoman police arrested the whole group, including Shatev. In 1901 the prisoners were deported το Bulgaria, after pressure from the Bulgarian government, where they consulted with members of a small anarchist group in Salonika, who agreed to blow up the local branch of the Ottoman Bank. In late April 1903, together with a group of young anarchists from the Gemidzhii Circle, he launched a campaign of terror bombing known as the Thessaloniki bombings of 1903. He used dynamite to blow up the French ship "Guadalquivir" which was leaving Thessaloniki harbour. He was captured and sentenced to death, but later his sentence was changed to life imprisonment in Fezzan in modern day Libya.