Bulgarian Police Detain 50 Migrants near Pernik

Photo by BGNES

Fifty migrants have been detained near the southwestern town of Pernik, not far from Bulgaria's capital Sofia, local officials say.

District governor Irena Sokolova told Focus News Agency the migrants were found traveling in the carriage of a truck with a Pernik license plate en route to Kyustendil, another town located close to Bulgaria's borders with both Macedonia and Serbia.

The group included "mostly young people"with "two babies" traveling with their mothers. There were "seven women and seven children, the rest were men", Sokolova said.

She added "the smuggler" was facing pretrial proceedings.

This comes amid increasingly frequent reports of migrants influx from Bulgaria to Serbia - the country which most Middle Eastern and North African migrants have been using as a transit route for Germany via Croatia or Hungary.

So far Bulgaria has been spared most of the flow via Macedonia, Serbia and Greece.

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