Lars Joachim Mittank, born in Berlin in 1986, grew up and worked as a mechanic in Schleswig-Holstein, in the far north of Germany. In the summer of 2014, aged 28, he took his first trip abroad, a week’s holiday in Varna on Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast with five old school friends, staying at the Golden Sands resort. They were due to fly home to Hamburg on July 7.
What happened
Two days before the end of the holiday Mittank was hit on the left ear in a scuffle. Accounts say it began as an argument about football with a group of other German tourists, and that he was outnumbered. He came back with a damaged eardrum and could not hear properly. A local doctor told him not to fly and prescribed an antibiotic, reported in different accounts as cefprozil or cefuroxime. His friends flew home as planned, and he moved for the night into the Hotel Color, a cheap hotel near the airport, intending to travel the next day.
That night he rang his mother, Sandra, several times. He was whispering, said he thought he was being followed and that someone wanted to rob or kill him, and asked her to block the bank card he had used to check in. Hotel cameras recorded him pacing, looking out of the windows and hiding in the lift. He left the building for about an hour after midnight, then before dawn took a taxi to the airport. His mother had booked him a flight and, as a backup, a bus ticket home.
On the morning of July 8 he went to the airport doctor, Kosta Kostov, for a fitness-to-fly check. Kostov later said he found nothing seriously wrong but that Mittank was nervous, distrustful and worried about his medication. When a man, said to be a construction worker, walked into the room, Mittank reportedly cried out that he did not want to die there and ran. He left his luggage, including his mobile phone. Shortly after 10 am local time, security cameras filmed him in a yellow T-shirt, dark shorts and white trainers, running out through the terminal, across the grounds and over a barbed-wire perimeter fence into the fields and trees beyond.
The investigation
He did not take either his flight or the bus, and he has not contacted anyone since. The police in Itzehoe, in his home region, issued a missing-person notice in August 2014 that gives his description and the timeline above, and Bulgarian police searched the area around the airport. His mother, Sandra, brought in the detective Andreas Gütig, who checked hospitals and shelters for unidentified men and handed out flyers in Varna without result. A Facebook group, Findet Lars Mittank, has collected tens of thousands of members and a steady stream of tips.
The airport footage spread widely and had passed 16 million YouTube views by 2018, making Mittank one of the internet’s best-known missing people. That fame has generated many reported sightings, including a hitchhiker picked up by a lorry driver in Germany in 2019 and a man on Düsseldorf’s Königsallee. None has been confirmed. A man found in Brazil in 2016 who looked like him turned out to be someone else.
The explanations
The most widely discussed explanation is a sudden episode of paranoia or psychosis. A Bulgarian pharmacist and two specialists who contacted police raised the possibility that the antibiotic, as a very rare side effect, especially in combination with alcohol or other medication, could have triggered it. Others have suggested an undiagnosed mental illness surfacing under stress. His mother has said he had no history of mental illness, and accounts differ on whether he had taken the pills at all.
The alternative, that he really was being pursued, perhaps by the men from the fight, has never been backed by evidence, and investigators have not identified anyone following him. His mother has also wondered whether he is alive but has lost his memory or his trust in people.
Where it stands
German police say there is no sign that he is alive and none that he is dead. The case is still open, and his mother continues to appeal for information. That Mittank fled the airport and vanished is documented on camera. Why he ran, and what became of him, is unproven.