Nine Israelis are deemed missing, and 33 have been hospitalized after the terrorist attack on a bus with Israeli tourists at Bulgaria's Burgas Airport Wednesday, reports say.
Initial reports said a number of Israelis were dead and wounded in the explosion which hit their bus at the Sarafovo Airport near Bulgaria's Black Sea city of Burgas at about 5:30 pm EET.
The Bulgarian authorities have confirmed there are casualties but have not confirmed their number. The site of the Burgas Airport says the Israeli tourists arrived on a flight of Air Via from Tel Aviv at 4:50 pm. After that, they got on a bus to reach Bulgaria's largest Black Sea resort Sunny Beach.
According to reports, there were about 40 Israeli tourists on the bus. A total of three buses caught fire on the Burgas Airport parking lot, a local news site.
A total of 33 people were hospitalized after the blast, three of them critical, and one of those three dying shortly after that, Burgas Mayor Dimitar Nikolov told bTV Wednesday night, about 2.5 hours after the explosion.
The bus driver, who is Bulgarian, is also in a critical condition, he said.
According to the bTV correspondent, nine Israeli tourists are deemed missing, with reports stating the death toll at 3, 5, or 7.
All flights from the Burgas Airport have been redirected north to the Varna Airport after the explosion.
According to Mayor Nikolov, there was "a very strong explosive that was deliberately placed or brought into the baggage compartment of the bus".
He said the Israelis arrived to Burgas on a flight from Tel Aviv with 151 people on boad, including one American and one Slovenian citizen. He said also that the Bulgarian authorities have managed to create an organization to investigate "a very severe incident."