Charred wreckage and crumpled vehicles of all sizes littered stretches of Bulgaria’s major Trakia motorway in the immediate wake of a pair of catastrophic multi-vehicle collisions that unfolded on a fog-shrouded early morning, leaving a confirmed death toll of at least 11 people and dozens more with injuries of varying severity. The string of deadly crashes unfolded on the morning of the incident near the town of Zimnitsa in south-eastern Bulgaria, involving more than 70 passenger cars and heavy goods vehicles across both directional carriageways of the key transnational route. According to official statements relayed by Bulgaria’s state BTA news agency, Health Minister Katya Ivkova confirmed 10 people were pronounced dead at the crash site, while a 11th succumbed to their injuries after being transported to a local medical facility, with a total of 46 people receiving treatment for wounds ranging from minor cuts to life-threatening trauma. Sliven regional governor Mihail Kasherov verified the unprecedented scale of the incident, noting that the debris field stretched far across the motorway surface, trapping numerous occupants inside mangled vehicles. Investigators pointed to extreme weather conditions as the core triggering factor: thick, unanticipated dense fog cut visibility to near zero, spawning the first pile-up on the motorway’s eastbound lanes. The second catastrophic crash unfolded minutes later on the adjacent Sofia-bound carriageway, as drivers slowed or stopped to gawk at the first collision, with the lingering thick fog leaving them with no time to react to stopped traffic ahead. Road administration director Galin Kostov added that many motorists were travelling at speeds far too high to navigate the slick, wet road surfaces and zero-visibility conditions safely, exacerbating the scale of destruction. The first emergency call alerting authorities to the disaster came in at 07:10 local time (05:10 GMT), prompting a massive multi-agency rescue response across the Yambol, Sliven and Burgas regions. Yambol regional governor Georgi Chalakov explained that rescue teams were forced to cut through and remove large sections of the motorway’s metal crash barriers to reach trapped occupants, as the persistent dense fog grounded all medical evacuation helicopters, forcing first responders to rely exclusively on ground ambulances to ferry injured parties to nearby hospitals. Drone footage captured from above the crash site, barely visible through the swirling thick fog, showed the full extent of the tangled line of wreckage snaking across the motorway. Multiple eyewitnesses who survived the chaos shared harrowing accounts of the moments after the collisions, with one local resident who pulled a trapped man from a burning vehicle telling Reuters the disaster was entirely driven by the impenetrable, extremely thick fog. Another shaken survivor recalled seeing dozens of wrecked vehicles stacked behind his own car, including multiple heavy trucks, saying he could barely recall how he escaped the pile-up alive. The tragedy prompted Bulgarian Prime Minister Rumen Radev to abruptly cut short an ongoing joint press conference he was hosting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, so he could travel to the crash site to coordinate emergency response efforts. Officials confirmed the Trakia motorway, which runs east-west across Bulgaria and passes through the capital city of Sofia, would remain fully closed to all traffic until every piece of crash debris was cleared and the route was deemed safe for travel.