Human remains were found aboard a vessel struck by a drone off the Romanian coast last month, prosecutors in Bulgaria said on Saturday, where the vessel was being repaired. "During debris-clearing operations, severely damaged human remains were discovered," the prosecutor's office in the eastern Bulgarian city of Varna said in a statement, reported by AFP. It added that DNA testing had been ordered to identify the victims.

Source: AFP, Nov 7-8 2026 — Human remains found on ship struck in Black Sea off Romanian coast (Varna prosecutor's office statement)

The prosecutors did not name the vessel, but said it was sailing under the San Marino flag — matching that of the Wine Trader, a chemical tanker hit on October 15 about 24 kilometres (15 miles) southeast of Sulina, at the mouth of the Danube, AFP said. Romanian reports said the ship caught fire after the drone hit, and a large rescue operation with Black Hawk helicopters and boats was hampered by heavy swell. The damaged ship was later towed to Bulgaria and reached the shipyard in Varna in early November; a criminal investigation into the attack is under way in Romania.

Source: AFP, Nov 7-8 2026; event reporting compiled by Pollar (Romanian reports, El Confidencial, Libertatea)

How many victims? The reports differ — and prosecutors have given no figure

The condition of the remains made it impossible to determine the exact number of bodies with certainty, a Bulgarian law enforcement source told AFP, saying there were "most likely six" victims. Bulgarian public radio BNR, which did not detail its sources, reported that the remains of five sailors who had been missing since the attack were found. The Varna prosecutor's office itself has published no figure, and the reporting does not establish whether all of the remains belong to the seven crew members declared missing. Awaaz Punjab is therefore reporting both attributed counts and the prosecutors' position — no confirmed death toll exists yet for this discovery.

Source: AFP via BytesEU/NDTV syndication, Nov 8 2026; BNR reporting via Pollar event page, Nov 7 2026

The Wine Trader strike was one of a series of drone attacks on merchant shipping in the western Black Sea since early October, which a Reuters factbox on November 3 described as drawing NATO states Romania and Bulgaria deeper into the fallout of Russia's war on Ukraine; the factbox listed the Wine Trader among the hit vessels, with seven crew missing. Romanian President Nicusor Dan attributed the Wine Trader strike to Moscow, saying it was intended to destabilise NATO's eastern flank — an attribution reported by Romanian and Spanish media; the reports used here do not carry a Russian response to that attribution.

Source: Reuters factbox, Nov 3 2026 — How NATO states on the Black Sea are being drawn into Ukraine war escalation

What happens next: the DNA results will determine how many of the victims can be identified and whether they are among the seven missing crew. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is due to visit Bucharest on Monday, November 9, and Varna on Tuesday, November 10, where she is set to meet Bulgarian Prime Minister Roumen Radev and visit the Naval Academy, according to the Commission — a visit that puts Black Sea shipping security in front of the EU's leadership days after the discovery.