Bulgaria said Wednesday it plans to build a fence on its southeastern border with Turkey to limit the number of illegal Syrian immigrants entering the country and creating a refugee crisis.

Deputy Interior Minister Vasil Marinov said the ministry had proposed building a 30 kilometer (19 mile) long, three meter (10 feet) tall barrier in the mountainous region of Elhovo.

Bulgaria's foreign minister said Wednesday that his country was holding out hopes to join Europe's visa-free Schengen zone despite strong French opposition over the last week.

"It is still realistic to achieve a staged Schengen accession," Kristian Vigenin told journalists in Sofia, saying he would bring up the issue during a visit to Paris next week.

Bulgaria sacked the head of its refugee agency for mismanagement on Wednesday, as the EU's poorest country continued to struggle with an ever-growing number of refugees fleeing Syria's civil war.

"Nikola Kazakov was dismissed for inadequate organization of the process for granting refugee status, which created conditions for overcrowding at the accommodation facilities," Interior Minister Tsvetlin Yovchev said.

Bulgaria needs EU aid as its capacity to take in more refugees from Syria's civil war is nearing breaking point, the EU country's interior minister said Thursday.

"We are working to minimize the risks not only for Bulgaria but for the European Union also," Tsvetlin Yovchev told Agence France Presse in an interview, referring to the risks of the refugees slipping into other EU countries.

The European Union's poorest country Bulgaria launched an appeal on Tuesday for financial support from the bloc to help it cope with an influx of people fleeing Syria's civil war.

"Bulgaria has proven itself as a reliable partner within the European Union. We have shown that we can protect the EU's outer border, while undertaking a serious burden ourselves," Interior Minister Tsvetlin Yovchev said in the town of Elhovo, on the southeastern border with Turkey.

Bulgaria aims to open a trial by April for a bomb attack that killed five Israeli tourists at an airport last year, the chief prosecutor said Thursday.

"Our ambition is to go to court... by the end of the first three months of next year at the maximum," Sotir Tsatsarov told journalists.

Bulgaria said Friday it might request foreign aid to cope with the ever growing numbers of illegal immigrants fleeing from Syria, for whom it has no more space.

The cash-strapped government said it had decided "to review the possibilities of receiving financial aid... from the European Union, NATO, the U.N. refugee agency and the International Organisation for Migration."

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki lobbied Friday for international help to protect the new round of peace talks with Israel in the face of what he said were Israeli attempts to 'derail' the negotiations.

"Our concern here is really how we could preserve, protect the process from being derailed by Israel and what kind of mechanisms are needed by the international community in order to protect that process," Maliki said after talks in Sofia with his Bulgarian counterpart Kristian Vigenin.

A Turkish man convicted in absentia of plotting to overthrow the government at a high-profile trial earlier this month was arrested after escaping into Bulgaria, officials said Wednesday.

Levent Temiz, 38, was detained near the southeastern border town of Malko Tarnovo on August 8 after entering Bulgaria illegally, the interior ministry's chief of staff Svetlozar Lazarov told journalists.

British Ambassador to Lebanon Tom Fletcher expressed concern on breaches to the dissociation policy by some parties, denying that the EU's decision to blacklist Hizbullah's military wing doesn't target the Shiite sect.

“The dissociation policy is shaky, in particular after Iran decided to send Lebanese men to fight for (President Bashar) Assad,” Fletcher said in an interview with As Safir newspaper on Tuesday.