SOFIA: A woman set herself on fire outside Bulgaria’s presidential headquarters in Sofia on Monday, in a repeat of a series of self-immolations driven by poverty in the crisis-hit Balkan country last year, the interior ministry said.
Live television footage showed firefighters carrying a burned woman on a stretcher and loading her into an ambulance.
The victim, a 38-year-old woman according to the ministry, was badly burned but alive, the hospital said.
“I was standing here when all of a sudden she lit up like a torch, her legs were kicking,” a shocked elderly man told Kanal 3 television.
The woman’s identity and the motives behind her desperate act were unclear.
It was a reminder of a series of similar incidents in crisis-hit Bulgaria last year where at least six people died after setting themselves on fire in public between February and May.
Most of the self-immolations were driven by poverty and despair. -AFP