Two Iraqi men were found frozen to death Friday in a mountain forest in southeastern Bulgaria, which has been pounded by blizzards, police said.

Villagers made the grim discovery in the Strandzha, a massif that straddles the Bulgarian-Turkish border, police in the regional capital of Burgas said. The men were aged 28 and 35.

The Strandzha is the only part of the 200-kilometre frontier that has not been closed off by barbed-wire fencing — a measure aimed at discouraging migrants from crossing into EU member Bulgaria.

On Monday, a Somali woman was found dead from the cold in the same region.

The influx of more than one million asylum seekers — mostly from war-torn Syria — into the European Union in 2015 triggered the worst refugee and migrant crisis on the continent since the Second World War.

But the number crossing to European shores on rickety boats plunged in 2016 by almost two-thirds to 364,000, EU border agency Frontex said Friday.

Frontex pointed to an EU border deal with Turkey, which came into effect in March, as having paved the way to a massive decline in the number arriving in Greece.

source: GULF NEWS