A "fixer" who hired a hitman to commit a notorious murder died at a Scottish high security prison from a cocaine overdose.
Deyan Nikolov, 33, was found dead at Glenochil Prison, Clackmannanshire, where he was serving a life sentence for helping to arrange the murder of Fife businessman Toby Siddique.
A fatal accident inquiry heard that five bags of cocaine were found in his locked single cell together with tablets and prescription medication - including antidepressants belonging to another prisoner.
A ballpoint pen casing with the cartridge removed -- which the inquiry was told was commonly used to "snort" cocaine" - was also found.
A post mortem revealed that Nikolov, a history graduate who initially came to Britain as a student for seasonal farm work in 2005 and who spoke four languages, Russian and Polish as well as English and his native Bulgarian, had died of cocaine toxicity coupled with coronary artery atheroma.
A police investigation found that a plastic bag which was lying near his head when a prison officer at the jail discovered his body - at 7.15 am on June 11th, 2018 - had probably fallen out of his waste bin, and was not linked to his death.
Earlier reports that the bag had been over his head were discounted.
Detective Constable Jamie Reid, 32, said there was "nothing of a suspicious or criminal nature" about the bag, but although there were "obvious signs of drug misuse" in Nikolov's cell, police inquiries had never managed to identify the source of the cocaine that killed him.
He said officers did find what he called a "Beat the Boss" burner phone - an illegal mobile so small it could be hidden in a wifi speaker -- in his cell, but it was PIN-locked and attempts by forensic examiners to crack it had yielded nothing.
Alan Morrison, depute fiscal at the inquiry, said Nikolov had told police in 2012 he had experimented with drugs as a teenager but never touched them as an adult.
During his period in custody he had been subjected to seven random drug tests, and all had been negative.
Prison warder Vicky Hamilton, 35, who was Reid's personal welfare officer, said she could recall no instances of him being under the influence of drugs, and she had noticed no change in his behaviour in the period leading up to his death.
She had that before his death - which she described as "extremely unexpected" - he had suffered an assumed assault in the jail gym, but had claimed it was an accident.
After this, she said, Nikolov "didn't go to the gym as much as before."
In a further twist, she revealed that a week before his death, he had been caught with "the most sophisticated" moonshine still she had ever seen in the jail.
Officers raided his cell early in the morning after detecting "a strong smell of hooch" to find he had rigged a bin with heating wires connected to a plug socket, and was distilling alcohol from a mixture of bread and water so the vapour would travel through a pipe and drip into a plastic bag.
However the device had "exploded" in the night, and when officers burst into his cell they found Nikolov still asleep and "hooch" all over his cell floor.
Ms Hamilton said: "It was like an actual contraption that had been engineered. I'd never seen anything like it before or since."
Nikolov, 33, an ex-bouncer from Kirkcaldy, was jailed for a minimum of 18 years in 2012, raised to 23 years on appeal, after arranging for hitman Tencho Andonov to kill Mr Siddique at a house in Glenrothes in 2010.
He and two other men were found guilty of murder.
The victims brother, Mohammed Azam Siddique, 41, was jailed for a minimum of 25 years after hiring Andonov to execute his brother over their business rivalry.
Andonov was also convicted of attempting to murder former security man David Dalgleish, 44, who lived at the flat and had been left for dead.
The trio were eventually caught after Nikolov missed his getaway flight by forgetting his passport and were convicted after a four-month trial - one of the longest murder trials in Scottish criminal history.
Following the inquiry, at Alloa Sheriff Court, Sheriff Neil Bowie will give his determination in writing at later date.
