SOFIA, Bulgaria
Bulgarian authorities seized thousands of fake Syrian passports in the country's second-largest city of Plovdiv on Monday, an interior ministry official said.
Secretary General of the Bulgarian Interior Ministry Svetlozar Lazarov said five people including a woman were detained in connection with the operation of the illegal production of the passports.
The officials found around 10,000 components for the production of the fake Syrian passports which allegedly were to be smuggled to Turkey.
Lazarov also said the head of the illegal network was a forty-year old Bulgarian, but did not release the name of the ringleader.
A Syrian passport allows Syrian refugees who have fled the stalemate humanitarian crisis to receive residence permits in Turkey.
The civil war in Syria has killed more than 191,000 people, according to a UN report, and displaced millions of others since March 2011.
The first Syrian refugees began to cross into Turkey in April 2011. As of June 2014, there were 700,000 refugees in the country, 70 percent of whom live outside the refugee camps, according to the UN.
The total number is expected to be as high as 1 million by the end of 2014.
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