Here is the unsettling story behind the German tourist who ran out of the airport and was never to be seen again.
Back in 2014, 28-year-old Lars Mittank travelled with a group of friends to a seaside resort near the town of Varna, Bulgaria. It was his first time leaving his home country.
Mittank and his group stayed at the popular Golden Sands resort.
However, the group’s holiday would soon go horrifically wrong, leading to one of the most famous missing person’s cases.
Lars Mittank has been missing for a decade now (Findet Lars Mittank)
What happened to Lars Mittank?
On the penultimate day of their holiday, Lars and his friends went to a bar where he got into a disagreement with a group of other German tourists over football. Later in the evening Lars would split off from his friends, who wouldn’t see him for the rest of the night.
The following morning, Lars returned to the resort and informed his friends that he’d been beaten up. Accounts on who the assailants were differ, with some friends saying it was men hired by the other group in the bar, while others believing it was the men themselves.
The attack left Lars with an injured jaw and ruptured eardrum and was prescribed an antibiotic.
He was then advised by a local doctor not to travel home with his friends on their pre-booked flight and remain in Bulgaria while he recovered.
Lars’ situation would deteriorate drastically after his friends departed. After checking into a hotel near the airport he began to exhibit signs of paranoia and would call his mother, claiming the people were trying to kill him. CCTV footage from the hotel would also show him acting strangely in the corridors.
On 8 July 2014, Lars arrived at Varna Airport in hopes of flying back to Germany. Before he could board his flight Lars would have to be checked over by the airport doctor in order to be declared fit to fly.
The doctor on duty, Kosta Kostov, would later report that Lars had been acting erratically during the consultation. After a construction worker entered the office it’s understood that the 28-year-old began to shout: “I don’t want to die here! I have to get out of here!” before running out of the office and into a nearby forest.
He would never be seen or heard from again.
Theories about what happened to Lars Mittank
The mysterious and unusual nature of the case has left online internet sleuths to come up with a variety of theories about what happened to Lars.
Popular theories included Lars developing psychosis from the antibiotics he’d been taking or due to a concussion caused by the fight.
Kostov would later debunk the antibiotic theory, revealing that Lars had never filled his prescription. Meanwhile it’s generally believed that injury induced psychosis can take years to develop.
Lars was last seen on CCTV running out of Varna airport (YouTube)
Bizarre conspiracy theories have since cropped up claiming that Lars had been drug smuggling, killed or trafficked would later appear on the internet. However, there is no solid evidence to back any of these claims up.
A German trucker would also claim to have given him a lift from Dresden to Brandenberg, but nothing would come from the tip.
With an absence of any concrete evidence, the most likely theory about what happened to Lars is psychotic illness – as his symptoms were consistent with that of a psychotic episode. The injuries suffered in the attack may also have triggered a pre-existing condition such as schizophrenia.
