The Man Who Ran: Lars Mittank and the Fence at Varna Airport
At about nine in the morning on 8 July 2014, a young German man walked into the small medical office at Varna Airport on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. He had a rucksack on his shoulder and a ruptured eardrum that had already cost him one seat on a plane. The airport doctor, Kosta Kostov, later described the visitor as nervous and erratic, sweating and difficult to follow. Then a workman in overalls opened the door. The young man began to shake. "I don't want to die here," he said. "I have to get out of here." He left his bag on the floor and ran.
A few dozen seconds of grainy security video are all that survive of what happened next. The man in it was Lars Mittank, and nobody has confirmed seeing him since.
Lars Joachim Mittank was born on 9 February 1986 in Berlin and grew up in Itzehoe, a small town in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany, where he worked at a power plant. The life around him was ordinary and settled: a girlfriend, old friends, a steady job, and a father who had suffered a stroke and whom Lars helped to support. He was 180 centimetres tall and dark blond, with a scar on his left forearm, and he had never travelled outside Germany before.
On 30 June 2014 he flew to Bulgaria with five friends for a package holiday at Golden Sands, the resort strip that runs along the coast just north of Varna. For almost a week the trip was what it looked like from outside: beaches, bars, late nights, nothing worth reporting.
On the night of 6 July, in a bar in the resort, Lars fell into an argument with a group of other German holidaymakers. The subject was football, his loyalty to SV Werder Bremen set against their support for FC Bayern Munich. Lars left his friends and did not come back to the hotel that night.
He reappeared the next morning. According to what he told his friends, four men had been sent by the group from the bar to find him, and they had beaten him. His jaw was hurt and one ear was in pain.
A doctor examined him on 7 July and found a ruptured eardrum. He prescribed cefprozil, an antibiotic, at 500 milligrams, and told Lars not to fly until the injury had begun to heal, because the pressure changes in a cabin could make it worse. His friends had a flight booked and took it. Lars stayed behind alone and checked into the Hotel Color, a modest place close to Varna Airport, planning to wait out the week and go home once a doctor cleared him.
Something changed that night. The hotel's own cameras recorded him leaving his room again and again to walk the corridors, standing at windows and looking out, and at one point standing inside the lift rather than in the open hallway. At around one in the morning he left the building altogether and was gone for roughly an hour. What he did in that hour has never been established.
He also telephoned his mother, Sandra Mittank. He told her that people were trying to kill or rob him and asked her to cancel his credit cards. When he called again in the morning, he told her the men were getting closer.
On the morning of 8 July he took a taxi to Varna Airport and arrived early. He sent his mother a message to say he had made it. Before checking in he went to the airport medical office, where his ear had to be assessed before he could be cleared to fly. That was where he met Dr Kostov, and that was where the workman opened the door.
The airport cameras picked him up as he came out of the office at a run. He crosses the terminal floor, pushes through the exit and keeps going past parked cars into open ground. In the last usable frames he climbs a low perimeter fence, crosses a meadow and heads towards a strip of woodland at the edge of the airfield. Then he is out of shot.
He had left almost everything behind: the rucksack, his wallet, his mobile phone, his passport and his medication. He had no money and no papers. He was dressed for a hot morning, in shorts, a T-shirt and light shoes.
Bulgarian police opened a search on 9 and 10 July. Officers with dogs worked the woodland and the fields; helicopters flew a radius of roughly ten kilometres around the airport; local volunteers joined teams going through the nearby villages. Nothing was found. No body, no discarded clothing, no belongings, no verified sighting by anyone nearby.
His mother did not accept that the search had gone far enough. Sandra Mittank travelled to Bulgaria, campaigned in the German and Bulgarian press, and hired a private investigator, Andreas Gütig, who searched hospital admission records for unidentified patients. A reward of 40,000 euros was offered for information leading to Lars. Neither the reward nor the publicity produced a confirmed lead.
The publicity itself was enormous. The airport footage, released to help find him, travelled far beyond the missing-person appeal it was meant to serve. By May 2018 the clip had passed sixteen million views on YouTube alone, and Lars Mittank had acquired the grim title of the most famous missing person on the internet.
A handful of possible sightings have been reported since. About a year after he vanished, a lorry driver said he had seen a man resembling Lars hitchhiking in the Varna area. In 2019 a German lorry driver reported picking up a hitchhiker on a run between Dresden and Oberhavel in Brandenburg who, he thought, looked like an older version of Lars: long hair, a beard, hollow cheeks and tired eyes. Neither account could be verified, and no photograph or second witness supported either.
More than a decade on there has been no activity on his accounts, no use of his documents, no confirmed contact with anyone who knew him, and no remains. If he is alive, Lars Mittank is forty years old this year. The Bulgarian file is open. So is the German one.
Conclusions and Open Questions
What makes this case unusual is how much of it is documented. There is video of the flight itself, a named doctor who witnessed the moment it began, hotel footage from the night before, and phone calls that his mother has described consistently for years. What is missing is everything after the treeline.
The explanation most often raised, and the one Sandra Mittank has favoured, is a reaction to medication. Cefprozil belongs to a family of antibiotics for which confusion, hallucinations and paranoia appear among the rare adverse effects, and the timing looks persuasive: Lars was calm before the prescription and frightened afterwards. The objection comes from the last person to speak to him. Dr Kostov stated that Lars had not taken the drug and had not even had the prescription filled. If that is accurate, the theory collapses. It also has to explain why his fear began the same night, before any course of tablets could plausibly have built up in his system.
A second theory points to the assault itself. Some argue that a blow hard enough to rupture an eardrum and injure a jaw could have caused a concussion or a slower bleed, and that the terror came from the head injury rather than from any drug. Against it: doctors examined him twice in two days and neither recorded anything neurological. Head trauma also explains the panic without explaining the disappearance, since a disoriented man on foot with no money inside a searched ten-kilometre radius should have been found.
A third reading is psychiatric: a first psychotic episode brought on by stress, injury, alcohol, sleeplessness or some combination, in a man with no recorded history of mental illness. This fits the behaviour closely, including the hiding in the lift and the conviction that he was being hunted. It fits the outcome badly. Acute episodes usually end with the person turning up somewhere: a hospital, a police station, a field.
One theory holds that the fear was justified: that the beating was not a drunken reprisal over football but a warning from someone Lars had crossed, and that whoever he was afraid of found him. Bulgarian police identified no assailants and no criminal trail, and no ransom demand or body ever appeared, which leaves the idea resting entirely on his own words to his mother. It belongs in the column of open questions, not findings.
Others suggest the simplest ending: that he ran into rough country in summer heat with no water, died within a few kilometres, and was missed by the search. Dogs and aircraft covering that ground make it unlikely, though scrub and drainage channels can hide a body for a long time.
A final possibility, argued mostly by those who take the two roadside sightings seriously, is that Lars survived, left Bulgaria and chose not to come back. It is the version his mother has said she wants to believe, including the idea that he may be alive with no memory of who he is. It requires a man with no passport, no money and no working Bulgarian or English to cross borders and stay invisible for twelve years without touching a bank account. That is a very heavy load for two unverified glimpses to carry.
What remains genuinely unexplained is smaller and more specific than any of the large theories. Where was Lars during the night of 6 July, between leaving the bar and returning bruised the next morning? Who were the four men, and why was not one of them ever identified? What did he do in the hour after one in the morning, when he walked out of the hotel? Why did the sight of a workman in overalls frighten him so precisely? And how does a man in shorts and light shoes, carrying nothing at all, leave no trace whatsoever inside a ten-kilometre circle around an international airport?