5 Bulgaria Terror Victims Named

The Interior Ministry released on Thursday the names of the five Israelis murdered in a suicide bombing in Bulgaria Wednesday: Itzik Colangi, 28, Amir Menashe, 28, Elior Price, 26, Maor Harosh, 25, and Kochava Shriki, 44.

An IAF plane carrying the bodies left Bulgaria Thursday night. Their funerals are scheduled to take place on Friday.

Itzik Colangi and Amir Menashe were good friends from Petah Tikva. Colangi’s wife GIlat gave birth to their first child, Noya, four months ago, and his birthday was two weeks ago. The couple decided to celebrate in Burgas with their friends Natalie and Amir Menashe, who have a ten-month-old son, Rom. Gilat was severely injured and Natalie was lightly injured from the terrorist attack, while Itzik and Amir were killed while packing their luggage onto the bus.

Colangi’s funeral will be on Friday at 10:30 at the Segula Cemetery in Petah Tikva. Menashe’s will be one hour later, in the same place.

Elior Price, a student, and Maor Harosh, an electrician, grew up together in Acre and went on vacation to Bulgaria with another close friend, Daniel Fahima. Harosh and Price were killed, while Fahima was severely injured.

Kochava Shriki of Rishon Lezion, was pregnant for the first time after years of fertility treatments. She gave her family the good news shortly before leaving for vacation in Bulgaria with her husband Yitzhak. After the attack, Yitzhak, who was injured, searched for Kochava in the rubble and in the hospital in Bulgaria, and learned of her death a day later.

Thirty-three people wounded in the bus bombing a landed in Israel at 2:30 on Thursday afternoon at Ben-Gurion airport and were immediately transferred by ambulance to area hospitals. The majority of the victims that returned on Thursday were lightly injured though four were injured seriously or critically.

The terror attack targeting Israeli tourists killed at least seven people in the city of Burgas, soon after a charter plane, Air Bulgaria flight 392 arrived from Ben-Gurion Airport. The seven included five Israelis, the bus driver and the suicide bomber, according to the Foreign Ministry.

Israeli officials have released security video of who they believe is the suicide bomber who carried out the attack. The footage shows a man wander into the arrivals hall at the airport here, for all appearances just another tourist in his plaid shorts, Adidas T-shirt and baseball hat. It later turned out that he carried a fake Michigan driver’s license.

But it is his oddly bulky, oversized backpack that, in terrible hindsight, stands out the most. This bag, investigators believe, contained the bomb that the man is suspected of detonating next to a bus outside the airport, killing five Israeli tourists, a Bulgarian bus driver and himself in a fireball that upended this city on the Black Sea.

The suicide attack, the country’s first, has sent police and intelligence officers from Bulgaria, Israel and the United States scrambling to identify the bomber and to look for possible accomplices and convincing evidence that would connect him either to Hezbollah, the radical Lebanese group allied with Tehran, or the Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Officials here have said they have the man’s fingerprints and his DNA. Authorities, using the word “kamikaze” as a synonym for suicide bomber, are looking for a man who was roughly 36 years old, whom they suspect was been in the country between four and seven days before the blast.

The Bulgarians are still trying to figure out how the bomber entered the country, how he traveled around the country and where he stayed.

The police have released the 14 seconds of video in the hope that the man will be recognized. Beyond that, investigators had more questions than answers, and two nations were in mourning.