A special crisis headquarters of Bulgaria's Foreign Ministry is expected to come up with a plan to evacuate the 200 Bulgarian citizens stranded in Egypt by the intensifying civil unrest.

Among Bulgaria's neighbors, Turkey has already sent three military planes to bring home its citizens currently located in Egypt, while Greece is about to dispatch two military planes to evacuate its citizens from Egypt.

Sunday afternoon, the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry issued a new warning against travel to Egypt and provided emergency telephone numbers, fax, and email addresses to its headquarters in Sofia and the Bulgarian Embassy in Cairo.

The families and relatives of the Bulgarians located in Egypt are encouraged to use them to receive or submit information to the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry. The provided contact information is as follows:

Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sofia, Bulgaria:

Tel.: (+359) 2 948 2404; (+359) 2 948 23 61
Fax: (+359) 2 971 36 20; (+359) 2 870 71 37
E-mail: egypt@mfa.bg

Embassy of the Republic of Bulgaria in Cairo, Egypt:

Tel.: +20 2 27 363 025 ; +20 2 27 366 077;
Mobile tel.: +20 12 317 05 04 ; +20 16 506 17 18
Fax: +20 2 27 363 826

According to private Bulgarian channel bTV, the evacuation of the 200 Bulgarian citizens located in Egypt at present will be debilitated by the difficult communications that will hinder the efforts of the Bulgarian diplomats to localize all Bulgarians in the country, and by the fact that the Bulgarian Embassy in Cairo is very understaffed.

No Bulgarian citizens have been hurt to date in the civil unrest in Egypt, which has been intensifying in the last 6 days.

Bulgarian tour operators have not terminated their organized vacations in Egypt; the last plane with Bulgarian tourists left for Egyptians resorts on Saturday, and the next scheduled flight leaves on February 5.

The tour operators have declared that the top Egyptian resorts have not been affected by the civil unrest in the country, and that they have readiness to evacuate their clients should a necessity emerge.

"The Foreign Ministry is alarmed by the events happening in Egypt. We appeal to Bulgarians to postpone and cancel all trips there," Bulgaria's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Vesela Cherneva said earlier on Sunday.

She declared the Ministry is in constant contact with the travel agencies which have organized the trips there and if needed those vacationers can be brought back to Bulgaria, adding even the possibility to send emergency airplanes has been discussed.

"Bulgarian tourists are concentrated in resorts, far away from the cities where riots and clashes are taking place. We don't believe, currently and in the next hours, their evacuation is a must. We monitor the situation closely, and we will make all effort to make sure our citizens are safe," Cherneva said.

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