{"id":20034,"date":"2026-08-21T13:00:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T13:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/2026\/08\/21\/bulgaria-police-detain-35-afghan-nationals-in-passenger-vehicle\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T13:00:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T13:00:22","slug":"bulgaria-police-detain-35-afghan-nationals-in-passenger-vehicle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/2026\/08\/21\/bulgaria-police-detain-35-afghan-nationals-in-passenger-vehicle\/","title":{"rendered":"Bulgarian police detain 35 Afghan nationals in passenger vehicle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bulgaria&#8217;s state news agency BTA reported that the country&#8217;s border police detained 35 undocumented migrants in the Malko Tarnovo area from a passenger vehicle. Police said all of those detained are Afghan nationals.<\/p>\n<p>Bulgaria&#8217;s Interior Ministry said the incident took place on August 18. According to officials, the 22-year-old driver of the vehicle, a resident of North Macedonia, was also detained by police.<\/p>\n<p>According to the report, Bulgarian police operations against illegal migration have expanded in recent months. Officials said the process of identifying and detaining undocumented migrants in border areas is continuing.<\/p>\n<p>In early August, 20 undocumented migrants and the driver of their vehicle were also detained in the Ropotamo River area, near the city of Burgas. Before that, in mid-June, 32 migrants and one of their guides were detained in the Poda area near Burgas.<\/p>\n<p>Bulgarian border police said that under new regulations, undocumented migrants at the country&#8217;s external borders are held in special centres for up to seven days and then transferred to migrant detention facilities. Malko Tarnovo and Burgas are among areas near Bulgaria&#8217;s eastern borders that have been repeatedly mentioned in reports related to migrant crossings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bulgarian border police detain 35 Afghan nationals and a North Macedonian driver in a passenger vehicle near Malko Tarnovo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20033,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-migrant-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}