Bulgaria said Thursday a suicide bomber dressed as a tourist and with fake US ID was behind an attack on Israelis that killed six people and left three seriously injured.
US President Barack Obama called the blast on a bus at Burgas airport on Wednesday, the deadliest against Israelis abroad since 2004, a “barbaric terrorist attack” as Israel blamed Iran and Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah.
“The suicide bomber, wearing shorts and carrying a backpack, looked like any other tourist,” Bulgaria’s interior minister said as the government released video footage of the suspect, who also died in the blast.
“He put his bag in the luggage compartment of the bus that blew up,” Tsvetan Tsvetanov told reporters.
“His travel document was a fake driving licence from the (US) state of Michigan … (His) identity has not yet been established.”
The video shows the man as being white with very long blond hair — possibly a wig — and sunglasses and wandering around the airport.
Tsvetanov said the man looked to be aged around 26. The authorities had his fingerprints and were testing for DNA, he added.
The explosion ripped through the bus as around 50 Israeli tourists arriving from Tel Aviv on a plane carrying 154 people were loading their bags and boarding before travelling to a nearby Black Sea holiday and gambling resort.
Five of the tourists died at the scene while the vehicle’s Bulgarian driver died in hospital, officials said, revising downwards an earlier toll of six killed plus the bomber.
The attack also wounded some 30 people, three of them seriously.
Witnesses described how panicked passengers jumped from bus windows and bodies lay strewn on the ground with their clothes torn off as ambulance sirens wailed and black smoke rose over the airport.
“I was on the bus and we had just sat down when after a few seconds we heard a really loud explosion,” one Israeli tourist, Gal Malka, told Israeli army radio. “The whole bus went up in flames.” “We are facing a global wave of terror… the attack in Burgas was led by members of Hezbollah and sponsored by Iran,” Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak told public radio.
“The Al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad networks also operate globally,” he added, citing a long list of recent attacks or attempted attacks on Israelis around the world including in Thailand, India, Georgia, Kenya and Cyprus.
The US “will stand with our allies, and provide whatever assistance is necessary to identify and bring to justice the perpetrators of this attack,” said Obama, who expressed his condolences to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli premier.
There was no official reaction from Iran but state television there said Israel’s “ridiculous” accusations were “aimed at creating an anti-Iranian atmosphere” amid rising tensions over Tehran’s suspected nuclear weapons drive.
The bombing, which struck on the 18th anniversary of an attack on a Jewish community centre in Argentina that killed 85 people, also drew strong condemnation from France, Britain, Russia and others.
Except for three people transferred to the capital Sofia, the other injured were taken to Burgas airport on Thursday morning amid a heavy police presence, to be flown home to Israel, an AFP reporter at the scene said.
They included a pregnant woman and a girl of around seven or eight years old who was carrying her flip-flop because her right foot was wrapped in bandages.
