At least seven people have died in a cold spell that has gripped the central Balkans after a massive snowstorm, media reports said Sunday according to dpa. The temperature in Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria plunged to as low as minus 22 degrees Celsius at the weekend, following a two-day snowstorm that created drifts up to 3-metres high in some areas. Rescuers in western Serbia on Sunday recovered the body of a51-year-old man who froze to death while returning home from a party in a village in the mountains near Valjevo, 80 kilometres west of Belgrade. Efforts meanwhile continued in the search for an elderly man who disappeared in the storm five days back, authorities in Valjevo said. In Romania, two people froze to death at the weekend, one of them a homeless man near Botswana, in eastern Romania, said the Health Ministry in Bucharest. That brings the death toll to seven since Thursday.
