Bulgaria's newly-appointed Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Egypt, Rumen Petrov, presented his credentials to the temporary government in Cairo, the Foreign Ministry in Sofia announced.

Petrov presented his credentials to the Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces of Egypt, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, on May 12, 2012, the Foreign Ministry said on Monday.

The ceremony was attended by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Arab Republic of Egypt, Mohamed Kamel Ali Amr.

At a meeting held as part of the ceremony, Field Marshal Tantawi emphasized the desire of Egypt's state leadership to develop and deepen relations between Egypt and Bulgaria, the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry press service reported.

Rumen Petrov was born in 1962 in the Northwestern Bulgarian town of Berkovitsa; he is a graduate of Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski with a degree in Arab Studies, and joined the team of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry in 1992.

Petrov was part of the staff of the Bulgarian Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, during the notorious Libyan HIV trail in which five Bulgarian nurses were sentenced by the regime of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and spent eight years in a Libyan jail.

Rumen Petrov was the temporary head of the Bulgarian Embassy in Tripoli up until the embassy's evacuation, shortly before the collapse of the regime of Gaddafi in the summer of 2011, when the Bulgarian Embassy in Tripoli remained the last functioning EU Embassy in Libya. Petrov was also a key figure in organizing the evacuation of the Bulgarian citizens from Libya during the 2011 Libyan Civil War.

Since March 2012, Petrov has been temporarily in charge of the Bulgarian Embassy in Cairo. He speaks Arab, English, Russian, as well as French and German.

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