Bulgaria says suicide bomber blew up airport bus

By Angel Krasimirov

BURGAS, Bulgaria (Reuters) - A suicide bomber carried out an attack that killed seven people in a bus transporting Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, the interior minister said on Thursday, and Israel said Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants were to blame.

Iran denied it was behind Wednesday's attack at Burgas airport, a popular gateway for tourists visiting the Black Sea coast.

Video surveillance footage showed the bomber was similar in appearance to tourists arriving at the airport, Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said.

The bomber had been circling around a group of buses, which were about to take Israeli tourists to a resort near Burgas, for about an hour before the explosion, the footage showed.

"We have established there was a person who was a suicide bomber in this attack. This person had a fake driving license from the United States, from the state of Michigan," Tsvetanov told reporters at the airport.

"He looked like anyone else - a normal person with Bermuda shorts and a backpack," he said.

The bomber was said to be 36 years old and had been in the country for between four and seven days before the attack.

Special forces had managed to obtain DNA samples from the fingers of the bomber and were now checking databases in an attempt to identify him, Tsvetanov said.