Athens, Greece ? Pursuing a “zero tolerance” policy against corruption, the IOC suspended a senior Bulgarian sports official accused of misconduct Saturday and revoked his credentials for the Athens Olympics.

Four lobbyists implicated in alleged vote-peddling for bid cities also were barred from the games.

Determined to avoid a repeat of the Salt Lake City scandal, the International Olympic Committee acted swiftly to deal with suggestions of bribery in a BBC television program on the bid campaign for the 2012 Summer Games.

“I’m more than disappointed — I am an angry man,” IOC president Jacques Rogge said. “I am angry at the behavior of some people within and without the IOC. The behavior of some people is tarnishing what is a wonderful movement. … It’s always very sad to see some individuals don’t respect the rules.”

Bulgarian IOC member Ivan Slavkov secretly was filmed by an undercover BBC television crew discussing how votes could be bought. The program, aired Wednesday in Britain, also featured four middlemen who said they could secure IOC members’ votes for money.

New York, Paris, London, Madrid and Moscow are vying for the 2012 Games. The IOC will select the host city in July 2005.

On other matters, the IOC:

• Put off a decision on whether to strip the entire U.S. 1,600-meter relay team of gold medals from the Sydney Games, saying it will wait until all appeals have been completed.

The team, which included Michael Johnson, could lose its medals because of a doping violation by teammate Jerome Young a year before the 2000 Olympics. Young already has been disqualified by the International Association of Athletics Federations.

• Appointed a three-man commission to investigate an Australian newspaper report that a doctor for the 2000 U.S. swimming team gave two American swimmers performance-enhancing drugs just months before the Sydney Olympics. The Advertiser quoted Glen Luepnitz as saying two female U.S. swimmers used a human growth hormone for several months. The names of the swimmers were not included in the report.
• Said it was studying the case of Belarusian sports minister Yuri Sivakov, who has been banned from the Athens Games by the Greek government because of alleged human-rights abuses.

The IOC ethics commission submitted a report on the vote-peddling case at the opening of a two-day executive board meeting. The board accepted the panel’s recommendations to “provisionally suspend” Slavkov of all his IOC rights and functions pending a full inquiry.

Slavkov contends he knew it was a setup and played along to expose what he thought was a real attempt to corrupt the process — a defense rejected by the ethics panel.

The IOC also withdrew Slavkov’s credentials for the Athens Olympics, which begin Friday.