A suicide bomber committed the attack that killed eight people in a bus transporting Israeli tourists at a Bulgarian airport, the country's interior minister said on Thursday, and Israel accused Iranian-backed Hezbollah militants of responsibility.
 
"We have established a person who was a suicide bomber in this attack. This person had a fake driving license from the United States," Interior Minister Tsvetanov told reporters at the airport of Burgas, a city on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast.
 
Tsvetanov said special forces had managed to obtain DNA samples from the fingers of the bomber and were now checking databases in an attempt to identify him.
 
He said Bulgarian security services had received no indications of a pending terrorist attack in the Balkan country.
 
Video surveillance in front of the airport and the investigation showed the bomber could not be distinguished among arriving Israeli tourists. "He looked like everybody else - a normal person with Bermuda shorts and a backpack," he said.
 
The interior ministry said the eight dead included the Bulgarian driver of the bus and the bomber.
 
About 30 lightly injured Israeli tourists will be flown back to Israel in the coming hours, Tsvetanov said.
 
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the Tehran-backed Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim group Hezbollah carried out the bombing. "The immediate executors are Hezbollah people, who of course have constant Iranian sponsorship," Barak told Israel Radio.
 
The blast occurred on the 18th anniversary of a bomb attack at the headquarters of Argentina's main Jewish organization that killed 85 people and the Argentine government blamed on Iran, which denied responsibility.
 
The tourists had arrived in Bulgaria on a charter flight from Israel and were on the bus in the airport car park when the blast tore through the double-decker. Body parts were strewn across the ground and mangled metal hung from the bus's ripped roof.
 
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Iran was behind the attack and that "Israel will react powerfully against Iranian terror." There was no immediate Iranian reaction to the Israeli accusation.