The papers today give extensive coverage to the incident with Bulgaria’s ex-ambassador to USA Elena Poptodorova at a duty-free shop at Warsaw airport.  

“Elena Poptodorova – embroiled in a shoplifting incident with cosmetics in Warsaw”, reads a headline carried by Sega newspaper. The paper quotes Polish media that the Bulgarian diplomat was apprehended by security guards outside the shop without having paid for cosmetics costing around 400 dollars. Poptodorova, who has a diplomatic passport declined contacts with the Bulgarian embassy in the Polish capital.

“Poptodorova – shoplifter or victim of hybrid war” reads a headline carried by 24 Chassa. The newspaper writes that after the news was made public in Poland, it was taken up in a flash by 90 different Russian forms of mass media which explicitly focus on the role of the Bulgarian diplomat in the country’s accession to the EU.

Dnevnik writes that Poptodorova has not worked at the foreign ministry since last year. The ministry’s press centre stated they did not know whether she was entitled to use her diplomatic passport after her term of office is over, the paper writes. Dnevnik adds that Elena Poptodorova was ambassador to USA twice – from 2002 until 2008 and from 210 until 2016. In the period from 1990 until 2001 she was a Bulgarian Socialist Party MP. In September 2016 Elena Poptodorova was appointed director of the new Warsaw office of Global Jewish Advocacy.

Trud carries a headline: “Poptodorova about the Warsaw incident: This is an absurd incident, I paid the fine.” “I was travelling to Bulgaria on an emergency – my mother who is 90 had a serious problem. To kill time at the airport, I entered the duty free zone and was taking a look at cosmetics. At that moment I received a call from Bulgaria and I went to look for a quitter spot to have the conversation. With all my attention on the conversation, I left the duty free zone with the product I was looking at,” says Poptodorova and adds that she was stopped by security guards and that she explained she had made an inadvertent mistake, apologized and paid the fine due. “And that was the end of it, I can’t imagine such an absurd incident, for which I of course am to blame and for which I am really sorry, attracting so much attention and being given such painful interpretations,” Trud writes, quoting Elena Poptodorova.

Compiled by Atanas Tsenov

English version: Milena Daynova