Bulgarian Border Police Defender

When Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007 its eastern and southern land borders became the Union's external frontier, and the Border Police — Гранична полиция, a directorate of the Interior Ministry — was re-equipped for the job with EU support. The Defender 110 station wagon was among the vehicles chosen: a nine-seat four-wheel-drive for patrolling the mountain and forest sections of the Turkish, Greek, Serbian and North Macedonian borders where the roads run out.

The vehicle in this record wears the service's flat grey-green with white ГРАНИЧНА ПОЛИЦИЯ panels on the front doors, a blue lightbar across the roof and a small EU flag on the rear quarter, the funding acknowledgement carried by equipment bought under Union programmes. Its flat bonnet places it before the Puma cars of 2007, so it is a Td5- or Tdi-era Defender. It was photographed by the Commons contributor Bin im Garten on 14 October 2011.

No procurement record for the fleet — quantities, dates or the units that ran them — was found in the sources consulted, and none is asserted here. What the record documents is one photographed vehicle.