On July 8th, 2014, a 28-year-old German man named Lars Mittank walked into an airport doctor’s office in Varna, Bulgaria. He sat down. Someone else walked in. And then Lars stood up, said six words — “I don’t want to die here” — and ran.
He sprinted through the terminal. He crossed the tarmac. He climbed a barbed wire security fence. He disappeared into a sunflower field beyond the airport perimeter and was never seen again. He left his passport, his wallet, his phone, and every belonging he had with him in a pile in that medical office.
The airport security cameras recorded all of it. Sixteen million people have watched the footage. Nobody has solved it.
Eleven years later, the case of Lars Mittank remains one of the most haunting and most-debated missing persons cases in internet history — and one of the most deeply unsatisfying. Because unlike so many cold cases where the absence of information is the problem, here we have footage, we have phone calls, we have a named doctor, we have a timeline. We have almost everything. Except an answer.
This is the full story.
Who Was Lars Mittank?
Before you can understand what happened in Bulgaria, you need to understand who Lars was before it happened. Because the contrast between the man and the disappearance is the thing that makes this case impossible to walk away from.
Lars Joachim Mittank was born on February 9th, 1986, in Berlin, Germany. He grew up in Itzehoe, a small town in the Schleswig-Holstein region of northern Germany — quiet, stable, the kind of place where life moves predictably and people tend to stay. And Lars, by all accounts, was content with that. He worked at a power plant in Wilhelmshaven — Germany’s only deep-water port and its largest naval base — in a stable, skilled role that suited a man who was reliable, consistent, and took his responsibilities seriously.
Outside of work, his life was full in the way that good, ordinary lives are. A large social circle. A long-term girlfriend. A deep connection to his family, particularly his mother Sandra. When his father suffered a stroke, Lars didn’t just send a card — he went over after work, regularly, to help around the house. He showed up. That detail matters more than it might seem, because it tells you something fundamental about who Lars was. He was not a man who disappeared from people’s lives. He was not a man who left without explanation. He was not, by any measure, a man capable of the kind of cruelty that voluntary disappearance would require.
He was, by every account from every person who knew him, completely normal. Kind. Easygoing. Grounded.
He was also, it turned out, a passionate Werder Bremen supporter. Which is where this story really begins.
The Holiday
On June 30th, 2014, Lars Mittank travelled with five close friends to the Golden Sands resort near Varna, Bulgaria — a popular seaside destination on the Black Sea coast, often described as Bulgaria’s answer to Ibiza. Cheap drinks, packed beaches, wall-to-wall European tourists in the height of summer. It was the World Cup season, and the semi-finals were playing on screens in every bar.
It was also the first time Lars Mittank had ever left Germany.
For five days, the trip was everything it was supposed to be. The group swam, sunbathed, went clubbing, watched football. Lars was relaxed and happy. His friend Paul Rohmann would later describe the week simply: “The week went by really fast.” Which is what good holidays feel like.
Then came July 6th.
The group was out at a bar in town, watching football, when Lars — in a move that is so specific and so characteristic that it almost makes you smile even knowing what follows — decided to have some fun with a group of Bayern Munich supporters at a nearby table. He switched their team flags around. A prank. The kind of low-level wind-up that football fans do to each other constantly, that should have ended with a few eye-rolls and a round of drinks.
It didn’t end that way.
A verbal altercation broke out. At some point Lars separated from his friends — they went for food at a nearby restaurant, and Lars didn’t join them. They didn’t see him again that night. When he turned up the next morning, he had been beaten up. Badly. A cracked jaw. A ruptured eardrum. He told his friends he’d been attacked by four men — the same men, presumably, from the bar.
His friends were due to fly home that day. A doctor examined Lars, confirmed the eardrum damage, and told him he couldn’t fly — the pressure change could cause severe and lasting injury. He prescribed an antibiotic called Cefprozil and referred Lars to a local hospital for further checks. Lars’s friends offered to delay their flights and stay. He wouldn’t hear of it. He was in a good mood, they later said. Relaxed. He told them to go, that he’d be fine, that he’d catch a later flight in a day or two.
They said goodbye. They flew home to Germany.
And Lars Mittank was alone in a foreign country for the first and last time in his life.
The Night Before
Lars checked out of the resort at the same time as his friends and moved to a different, cheaper hotel closer to the airport — the Hotel Color Varna. It was a practical decision. His flight home was being arranged for the following morning.
What happened next is documented almost entirely through hotel security cameras and phone records. And what those two sources show, in the hours that followed, is a man in the grip of something that nobody around him could see or understand.
The hotel CCTV captured Lars pacing the lobby. Hiding in the elevator — not riding it anywhere, just standing behind the closed doors as though the small metal box offered protection. Looking out windows. Checking and rechecking his surroundings. At 1am, he left the hotel. He came back approximately an hour later. Nobody knows where he went. Nobody has ever been able to account for that missing hour.
When he called his mother Sandra after returning, he was whispering. He told her he had to keep his voice down in case the four men heard him. He said they were following him. That they were going to rob him. That they were going to kill him. He asked her to cancel all of his credit cards immediately, so that his location couldn’t be tracked through his spending.
Sandra, hundreds of miles away in Germany, listened to her son whisper from a hotel room in a country she’d never been to, and tried to stay calm. They spoke multiple times through those early morning hours. In one call, Lars asked her what was in Cefprozil — the antibiotic he’d been prescribed for his ear. He seemed to be wondering, in real time, whether the medication might be affecting his mind. Whether his own perception could be trusted.
Here’s the detail that most coverage buries: according to the airport doctor who examined him the following morning, Lars had never actually filled the prescription. He may never have taken the Cefprozil at all. The implications of that will become important.
By 5am, Lars had already left for the airport. He called Sandra again to tell her he’d arrived safely. But in that call he told her something that contradicted what he’d said earlier — that he no longer had any money. He’d claimed to have cash just hours before. What happened to it in the intervening hours — during that unexplained 1am disappearance, or after — has never been established.
Sandra, frightened and desperate to get her son home, booked him the first available flight back to Germany and told him to see the airport doctor before boarding.
Lars agreed. He packed his bags.
The Airport
On the morning of July 8th, 2014, Lars Mittank arrived at Varna Airport with all of his belongings. Luggage. Passport. Wallet. Phone. Everything he needed to go home.
He went to the airport medical office to see the doctor, a man named Dr. Kosta Kostov. Kostov later described Lars’s behaviour throughout the consultation as “nervous and erratic.” He examined him and told him he was medically cleared to fly. Lars didn’t leave. He stayed in the office, according to Kostov, expressing doubt about the medication he had been taking.
Then someone else walked in.
This is where the official account becomes frustratingly unstable. Dr. Kostov’s description of who entered the room changed across multiple interviews — at times describing the person as a construction worker, which was plausible given the airport was undergoing renovation, and at other times suggesting it may have been an airline employee. Who exactly walked into that room has never been definitively established. The person has never been publicly identified. Whether they were ever found and interviewed remains unclear.
What we know is what happened next, because Kostov was there.
Lars began to tremble.
And then he said, out loud, in the hearing of the doctor: “I don’t want to die here. I have to get out of here.”
He stood up. He left his luggage — his passport, his wallet, his phone, everything — where it sat. And he ran. Full sprint, through the terminal, past travelers who stopped and stared. He hit the exterior doors and kept going — across the tarmac, toward the airport perimeter, where a barbed wire security fence marked the boundary of the airfield.
He climbed it.
On the other side was a sunflower field, and beyond it a forest. The security cameras tracked him until the frame ran out.
And then Lars Mittank was gone.
See the video here from: Missing People CCTV Footage.
The Search
Within hours, police, search dogs, and volunteers were combing the sunflower field, the adjacent forest, and the surrounding farmland. They searched for days. They found nothing. No clothing. No footprints. No remains. Not a single physical trace of Lars Mittank beyond the fence he had climbed.
His mother Sandra flew to Bulgaria to join the search. “It’s like the earth swallowed him up,” she said.
The Bulgarian authorities investigated, but the trail was cold almost immediately. The German Federal Criminal Police Office — the BKA — became involved and began coordinating with Bulgarian authorities through Interpol. The right channels were followed. The right protocols were enacted. And nothing moved.
The person who had entered the doctor’s office — the individual whose appearance had appeared to trigger Lars’s flight — was never publicly named. Whether the discrepancies in Dr. Kostov’s account were ever formally addressed is not a matter of public record.
Sandra Mittank, unwilling to wait for institutions that were moving too slowly and finding too little, built her own search operation. She hired a private investigator named Andreas Gütig, who travelled to Varna, reviewed the airport footage repeatedly, contacted hospitals and homeless shelters across Bulgaria, and distributed missing person flyers throughout the city. He found nothing that cracked the case open.
Sandra also took her search to television — appearing on programs in both Germany and Bulgaria, showing the footage, describing her son, asking anyone who had seen him to come forward. She created a Facebook group called Findet Lars Mittank — Find Lars Mittank — which as of 2025 has over 55,000 members. She continues to post updates. She continues to print flyers. She has never stopped.
The Sightings
Over the eleven years since Lars disappeared, reported sightings have come in from across Europe and beyond — each one arriving with a flicker of hope, and each one eventually extinguishing it.
About a year after his disappearance, a truck driver near Varna claimed to have seen a man matching Lars’s description hitchhiking on a remote road close to the airport.
A homeless man in Poland was reported to resemble Lars closely.
Someone on Reddit claimed to have seen him in Canada.
In 2016, the case generated its biggest surge of renewed hope when reports emerged from Brazil that Lars had been found — a disoriented man walking barefoot along a highway with no identification and no memory of who he was. Images spread across social media. The resemblance was striking enough that the world briefly held its breath. Then the truth came out. The man was Anton Pilipa, a Canadian man from Toronto who had been missing for five years, and who was eventually reunited with his own family. Two families’ grief, briefly and devastatingly tangled together.
In 2019, a German truck driver came forward to say he believed he had given Lars a hitchhiking ride from Dresden to Schildow in Brandenburg — the man had long hair and a beard, and the driver only connected the memory to the Mittank case after seeing coverage later that year.
In 2020, Sandra received a photograph of a young homeless man in Düsseldorf who resembled her son. Authorities investigated. It was not Lars.
Every lead. Every sighting. Every person who picked up their phone to say I think I saw him. Every one has ended the same way. A door that opens just wide enough to let the hope in, and then closes again.
The Theories
Eleven years on, with no confirmed sightings, no body, and no resolution, the case of Lars Mittank sustains four serious theories. None of them fully explains everything. All of them explain something.
Theory One: Medication-Induced Psychosis — Except There’s a Problem
The most widely circulated explanation is that Cefprozil — the antibiotic Lars was prescribed for his ruptured eardrum — triggered a paranoid psychotic episode as a rare side effect. Combine that with a head injury, isolation in a foreign country, sleep deprivation, and the psychological pressure of being alone abroad for the first time, and the case for a medication-induced crisis seems compelling.
But here’s the detail that most coverage quietly ignores: according to the airport doctor, Lars had never actually filled his prescription. If true, there was no Cefprozil in his system. The most popular theory in the case may rest on a foundation that simply isn’t there.
What remains, if the medication is removed from the equation, is a head injury serious enough to rupture an eardrum — which can cause neurological disruption, inner ear damage, spatial disorientation, and in some cases real paranoid symptoms — compounded by days of sleep deprivation and extreme psychological stress. It’s possible. But it’s a significantly harder case to make without the drug.
Theory Two: Real Foul Play
The four men who beat Lars were never identified. Never found. Never interviewed publicly. The person who walked into the airport doctor’s office and triggered his flight was never named. And Lars told his mother, with apparent coherence and clarity, that men were going to kill him.
Some people believe he was right.
The foul play theory holds that Lars was genuinely being pursued — that the threat he described to his mother was real, that his behaviour in those final days was rational survival instinct rather than psychotic delusion, and that whatever happened to him after he ran into that field was not an accident of the mind but a consequence of something very deliberate. The total absence of any trace of him — no remains, no belongings, nothing — is cited by some as consistent with a scenario where someone else was involved in ensuring there was nothing to find.
There is no direct evidence for this. But there is also no evidence against it.
Theory Three: Lars is Alive — Living Off the Grid
Rural Bulgaria in 2014 was genuinely remote in ways difficult to appreciate from Western Europe. Limited mobile access, limited internet, communities with minimal exposure to national news coverage. The theory here is that Lars ran into the forest, made his way to a remote area, and — with no ID, no money, no phone — built some kind of existence there. Possibly with amnesia resulting from his head injury. Possibly, in some versions of the theory, by some degree of choice.
What makes this theory harder to dismiss than it might seem is a detail rarely mentioned in coverage of the case: Lars Mittank had experience in hunting, fishing, and trapping. He was not without survival skills. Whether those skills would be enough against the Bulgarian summer heat with no resources is another question — but it means the possibility can’t be written off as quickly as the terrain alone might suggest.
Sandra Mittank has consistently expressed belief that her son is still alive, having lost his memory, living somewhere that has never connected him to the missing person case that bears his name.
Theory Four: Accidental Death
The simplest explanation. Lars ran into a sunflower field in July heat, disoriented and terrified. The forest beyond it is dense and unforgiving. He may have become lost, dehydrated, injured from the fence or a fall. He may have died within miles of the airport, quickly and alone, and the landscape swallowed the evidence. Bodies do disappear in remote woodland — it happens more often than people realise, and it leaves no trace that searches can find.
The persistent difficulty with this theory is the total absence of remains after extensive searches. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and eleven years of Bulgarian summers and winters are not kind to what they claim.
Where Things Stand
Lars Mittank would be 40 years old today.
His case is still officially open. The BKA still lists him as missing. Sandra still updates the Facebook group. Still prints flyers. Still gives interviews when anyone will have her. She has watched that airport footage more times than any person should have to watch the last recorded moments of their child.
She was asked once what it feels like to see it.
“Every time I see that video,” she said, “I feel like I want to protect him. I want to rescue him.”
Sixteen million views. Eleven years. One mother who won’t stop looking. And somewhere in the space between a Bulgarian sunflower field and the rest of the world — an answer that hasn’t come yet.
If you have any information about the disappearance of Lars Mittank, please contact the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) or reach out through the Findet Lars Mittank Facebook group, which is still actively monitored by his family.
Listen to the full Crime Clueless episode — “What was Lars Mittank Running From?” — on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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See you in the next episode of Crime Clueless!
References:
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