site.btaFour Bulgarian Medics Return Home from Turkiye

Four Bulgarian medics, who helped victims of the devastating earthquake in Turkiye for ten days, returned home on Thursday evening with a Bulgarian Spartan aircraft.

The medics worked on the ground in the city of Adana, and were brought back to Bulgaria on the return flight of the plane which earlier in the day transported a shipment of about 4.5 tonnes of humanitarian aid to Beirut, destined for Syria, which was also devastated by the the February 6 earthquake.

The medics, who are from the Military Medical Academy (MMA) in Sofia, were welcomed at Sofia Airport by the head of the medical facility, General Ventsislav Mutafchiiski.

The Bulgarian team was the first international team to land in Adana, Major Tsvetan Stanimirov, a -surgeon from the Military Medical Academy said. Subsequently, many teams arrived from Turkiye and other countries. According to him, the Bulgarian team also reached the city of Hatay, which they described as an "apocalypse".
"The whole city has been destroyed - infrastructure, hospital, police - everything," said Major Stanimirov.

Grief and hope in the eyes of the survivors, this is what senior officer Maria Borisova from the aeromedical evacuation sector shared about her experience in Turkiye.
For his part, the head of MMA, General  Mutafchiiski praised the Bulgarian medics for their quick reaction in leaving only two hours after the announcement of the Bulgarian government's decision to provide aid to its south-eastern neighbor and announced that there was a readiness and possibility to send new teams.