Bulgaria cracks down on ilegal immigrants as tensions rise

Bulgaria has turned back more than 100 clandestine immigrants at its border with Turkey at the weekend, an interior ministry official said Sunday, amid rising nationalist tensions in the European Union's poorest member. The group of migrants was stopped in the Strandzha mountains in the southeast of the country, the ministry's secretary general Svetlozar Lazarov told public radio. About 1,200 police officers were deployed in the mountainous and wooded region on Friday where around 100 migrants have been trying to cross the border every day for months. With an influx of nearly 10,000 people so far this year, Bulgarian authorities are struggling to accommodate the migrants and Interior Minister Tsvetlin Yovchev on November 4 announced plans aimed at speeding up expulsions of economic migrants, notably from northern Africa and Afghanistan. Lazarov said he expected the situation to ease. "We blocked the border and new centers will open" to accommodate the migrants, but those set to be expelled or whose asylum request is being processed will not be allowed to leave the shelters at will. "People who visibly have a humanitarian problem, in particular mothers with children, will be housed in shelters" and their requests examined in a fast-track procedure, the minister had said Monday. Polling institute Alpha Research has found that the refugee crisis -- which has taken the Bulgarian authorities by surprise -- is fanning nationalist tensions in the country. A new nationalist party that said it aims to "clean up the country of this scum, these immigrants" was founded on Saturday by one of several extremist groups, one of which calls itself Blood and Honor. In the northern village of Telish residents are protesting against the opening of a shelter in a former army barracks and residents are standing guard at night to stop any arrivals. Two men have warned they will set themselves on fire if authorities open a reception center. And on Friday night skinhead extremists beat up a Bulgarian Muslim, who are often of Turkish descent, because they mistook him for a Syrian. The man was hospitalized with serious injuries, Lazarov said, warning of "rising tensions" in the country. In another such incident a Cameroonian woman told public television she was hit in the head while waiting at a bus stop in the capital Sofia. A saleswoman meanwhile was wounded in a knife attack when she tried to stop a migrant from robbing her till.