Bulgaria saw 50% more migrant strain along its border with Turkey in 2023.
According to a BGNES reporter, the director of the "Border Police" Anton Zlatanov mentioned this during the General Prosecutor's Office's annual report-analysis in 2023.
According to Zlatanov, the General Directorate of Internal Affairs and Communications is the most diversified and largest entity in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. "We have had an extremely difficult but also satisfying year," he said, adding that there has been a 50% increase in migrant strain at the border with Turkey in the last year.
According to him, during the course of two or three months, 1,500 attempts to unlawfully cross the Bulgarian border were halted every day, highlighting the difficulty of fieldwork.
The director of the Bulgarian State Police also highlighted the shortage of all-terrain vehicles and the fact that border police were confronted with the difficulty of defending the border despite a severe lack of personnel and equipment. He stressed that all of these issues are currently resolved.
Zlatanov stated that 360 high-roadability cross-country cars will be acquired soon. "The moment the contract is signed, 60 cars will start arriving in batches," he said.
The Director of the General Directorate of Internal Affairs stated that a significant number of migrants attempted to penetrate our borders in a variety of methods.
The GDGP has also been closely monitoring what is going on near the Serbian border.
"In 2022, Austrian police prevented over 123 thousand migrants who tried to enter without identification. We were instructed to enhance our border security procedures. In our numerous discussions with Austrian authorities, we discovered that as a result of these steps, according to their statistics, the number of unlawful migrants has reduced to around 74,000 persons," Zlatanov added, adding that this was far more than the 20% that Austria had sought.
He responded to the Dublin Agreement, stating that every year, all of the countries that have signed it receive similar transfers of people and that this has nothing to do with Schengen membership.
"This year, we will have a threefold increase in the number of Frontex employees along the Bulgarian-Turkish border," Zlatanov declared, adding that we receive as much assistance from Frontex as we send. /BGNES
