Seven found guilty for container deaths

April 2003

Seven men were found guilty in a court in Belgium last week of offences relating to the Wexford tragedy in which eight Turkish asylum seekers, including four children, died.

The ringleaders, Bekim Jogai and Ozgur Doganbaloglu, both Turks, were sentenced to ten years in jail and fined €10,000 each. However, neither man was in court to hear the sentence passed, as they went on the run within days of the grim discovery at the Drinagh Business Park in Wexford.

Others who were sentenced at Bruges Correctional Court for their involvement included Flamour Domi, a Kosovar Albanian, who got six years but who is also on the run. His son, Donald Domi, was sentenced to eight years in prison. He was apprehended after the tragedy and will serve his time. Both father and son were also fined €5,000 each.

Two Brussels taxi drivers, Mohammed Kabani and Abedeslam Triba, were also found guilty of involvement, along with another man, Enver Berisha. They all received two-year sentences.

Charges against the driver of the truck which brought the container to Zeebrugge port in December 2001 were dropped after the court concluded that he had no knowledge of the people inside.

One of the five survivors, Majid Habbar, an Algerian national who is now working as a chef in Kelly’s Hotel in Rosslare, said afterwards that the sentences were far too light to reflect the suffering he endured and the horror of watching four adults and four children die.