Migrant deaths: evidence trail leads to Ireland
◼ 39 manslaughter charges for driver ◼ Gardai, CAB set to target money trail ◼ ‘Person of interest’ held at Dublin Port ◼ Priest: victims part of 100-strong convoy
IRELAND is increasingly at the centre of an international investigation into the deaths of 39 migrants smuggled into the United Kingdom in a refrigerated container.
An Irish lorry driver was charged last night with killing the 31 men and eight women who perished in a trailer found in Essex last week.
Maurice Robinson, a 25-year-old from Northern Ireland, is due to appear at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court tomorrow. He is charged with 39 counts of manslaughter, conspiracy to traffic people, conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration and money laundering.
Robinson was arrested shortly after the bodies were discovered. He was one of five people from the island of Ireland to be arrested in connection with the crime as the focus of the international probe now turns to Ireland. A gang of Irish smugglers is now suspected of playing a key role in the operation that ended with the deaths of 39 people, thought to be Vietnamese, the Sunday Independent has learned.
A criminal gang which operates on both sides of the Border is under suspicion and is understood to have a wide network of smuggling posts across the UK and links to international crime contacts.
Garda sources say intelligence on the gang has linked its activities to people smuggling in the past.
Gardai are assisting Essex police with the investigation into the 39 deaths.
A security source said inquiries to trace the financial transactions underpinning each stage of the global trafficking operation “are ongoing”. The Criminal Assets Bureau is expected to help international police forces in following the money trail.
A report by an international task force last year put human trafficking as one of the world’s most profitable crimes, estimating its global value at US$150bn.
The investigation intensified yesterday with the arrest of a man at Dublin Port over a separate incident. He is also wanted for questioning by Essex police over the truck deaths.
The man, who is also from Northern Ireland, is suspected of driving the container with 39 people on board being smuggled into the UK. Sources say he is suspected of picking up the container at a currently unknown European location last week before driving it to Zeebrugge, the Belgian port, where it was shunted on to a ferry.
The man who was arrested yesterday will be questioned by special investigators from the UK under a formal international agreement with Gardai.
Essex police have been given a GPS itinerary of the container’s movements last week. A source said this will help identify where people would have had an opportunity to board the trailer. The GPS data shows the trailer made stops in the same area where the 39 migrants were discovered when returning from Belgium on another trip.
Yesterday residents of a village in Vietnam feared their relatives were among the dead. They claimed the container was part of a convoy of three lorries bringing more than 100 migrants to the UK.
Police said they are not yet in a position to confirm the identities of victims but are focusing on engaging with Vietnamese communities after large numbers of people from the Far East, worried about loved ones, got in contact.
Father Anthony Dang Huu Nam, a priest from Vietnam’s Nghe An province, told Reuters news agency: “A few families confirmed the deaths of their relatives who are the victims of this tragic journey.”
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THE GULF between Monaghan and Asia spans vast distances and contrasting landscapes. Thousands of miles from the stony grey soil of the border county, a Vietnamese family bid goodbye to their daughter as she embarked on a journey to a better life.
Pham Thi Tra My’s parents told the BBC their daughter paid €30,000 for her secret passage to Britain, a 9,288km journey she is believed to have embarked on with 100 others from her province.
Last Tuesday night, the 26-year-old woman sent a text message to her parents: “I’m sorry Mom. My path to abroad doesn’t succeed. Mom, I love you so much! I’m dying bcoz I can’t breath [sic].
“I am sorry, Mom.”
Pham Thi Tra My’s family have not heard from her since, according to the human rights group, Human Rights Space, which posted the text.
In Vietnam this weekend, the young woman’s parents endured a harrowing wait for confirmation that their daughter was one of 31 men and eight women who had perished in a refrigerated container by the time it was opened on an Essex motorway in the early hours of last
Wednesday morning.
In Monaghan this weekend, the owners of GTR endured a very different kind of shock. A statement last week from the company — whose directors are listed as Kay Devlin and Mark Devlin — said they were “shell-shocked” and “gutted” at how their trailer was used. The company was “entirely unaware that the trailer was to be used in the manner in which it appears to have been”. Yesterday the company confirmed that it had leased the trailer to a third party.
It is giving every assistance to Essex police, including all of the data from the GPS tracking device on its trailer — a standard way for haulage companies to keep track of their vehicles.
The company offered its “sincere condolences” the families of those who died.
Exactly how the container ended up in the hands of a smuggling gang who used it to transport 39 people from Asia to the UK is now the subject of sprawling international police investigation.
Police in Essex have revealed little detail about their investigation into the discovery of 39 bodies in the back of refrigerated container on a roadside in Grays, Essex, in the early hours of last Wednesday morning.
The container of human cargo was “shunted” on to ferry from Zeebrugge in Belgium last Tuesday and docked in Purfleet, Essex, England at 12.30am last Wednesday.
Mo Robinson, the driver, arrived to collect the truck at 1.05am. The alarm was raised in Grays, a short distance away. Police have not disclosed who raised the alarm, or what caused the driver to stop at Grays where the bodies were discovered.
Forensic police examined the truck at the scene and later escorted it to Tilbury Docks. Post-mortems will determine the cause of death and how long the people were dead before the alarm was raised. The authorities in the UK were still attempting to identify the men and women who perished on what was supposed to be a journey to a better life.
Maurice (Mo) Robinson (25), a truck driver from Portadown in Northern Ireland, was charged in the UK yesterday with 39 counts of manslaughter, conspiracy to traffic people, conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration and money laundering.
He is due to appear at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court tomorrow.
Last Friday, police arrested three more people suspected of conspiracy to traffic people and manslaughter. Two were a husband and wife originally from Ireland, who were registered owners of the truck driven by Mo Robinson. They told police they sold the truck a year ago. Later a man from
Northern Ireland was arrested at Stansted Airport.
Yesterday, gardai arrested a man suspected of driving the container from an unknown location on the Continent to Zeebrugge, in Belgium. There, it was shunted onto a ferry bound for Purfleet in Essex, without its cab and driver.
The man was arrested on arrival at Dublin Port yesterday, having travelled from Holyhead in Wales. He is in his 20s and from Northern Ireland.
It is the biggest mass murder investigation of its kind in the UK and all five of those arrested so far are from the island of Ireland. Having earlier last week dismissed suggestions of an Irish link to this horrific incident, mounting evidence points back to an Irish connection.
“The tentacles seem to be coming back to Ireland,” said a garda source yesterday.
Security sources have told the Sunday Independent that a gang of Irish smugglers is suspected of playing a key role in the human trafficking operation, putting Ireland at the forefront of the investigation into the mass deaths.
The criminal gang which is under suspicion operates on both sides of the Border, and is understood to have links to international crime contacts.
According to Garda intelligence sources, the gang has been linked to people smuggling in the past.
Right now, however, gardai are assisting Essex police with their investigation, and have not launched their own. A security source said inquiries “are ongoing” by Essex police to trace the financial transactions underpinning each stage of the global trafficking operation.
The Criminal Assets Bureau is expected to assist inminister ternational police forces in following the money trail with a major financial investigation becoming a key part of the international inquiry.
Human trafficking is big money. A report by an international task force last year put human trafficking as one of the world’s most profitable crimes, estimating its global value at US$150bn. Using the crude measure of the €30,000 that Pham Thi Tra My paid to traffickers for her fatal crossing, the 39 victims could have netted close to €3m for organised criminals.
Police can trace the movements of the trailer from the GPS data. The GPS tracked its journey across mainland Europe between October 17 and 22, when it was dropped at Zeebrugge and on to Purfleet.
The data is believed to show that the container had made two previous trips from Britain to Europe before the bodies were discovered at Grays in Essex.
DCI Martin Pasmore of Essex Police said yesterday they are investigating “whether there is a wider conspiracy involved”.
“We have people coming into the country either being trafficked or as asylum seekers and we know that the borders are very tight and complicated,” he said.
“It must be clear that criminals, murderers are taking more and more chances with these vulnerable people and the risk is massive.”
The human toll of the deaths is incalculable for the families of the victims. The mass deaths have also exposed the ugly reality of human trafficking, where migrant families from impoverished nations hand over thousands to criminal gangs for their loved one to be sequestered away as illicit cargo and smuggled into affluent nations.
Vietnam is listed time and again by international advocacy groups and human rights agencies as a country from which citizens are trafficked, to China and to Europe, to work in the sex industry or as migrant workers. Vietnam is one of the top source countries for trafficking into the UK.
In the impoverished province of Nghe An, where Pham Thi Tra My lived, worried families told reporters about convoys of trucks offering to bring people from their villages to the UK for huge sums of money.
They spoke of three separate lorries travelling in convoy with human cargo. Two the vehicles are believed to have reached the UK, the third was delayed.
A priest in the town of Nghe An said he was aware of more than 100 people from the community making the journey, travelling to “a new life.”
Anthony Dang Huu Nam, of a Catholic church in Vietnam’s rural Nghe An province, told Reuters news agency: “According to a few sources that have told me, in this case there were many people, more than 100 were on their way to a new life, but 39 died. A few families confirmed the deaths of their relatives who are the victims of this tragic journey.”
Stories of missing loved ones are emerging from anguished families.
Reuters and the BBC reported yesterday on missing young people such as 19-yearold Bui Thi Nhung. “She said she was in France and on the way to the UK, where she has friends and relatives,” Nhung’s cousin, Hoang Thi Linh said.
Another victim is believed to be Anna Bui Thi Nhung from Nghe An province. Her relatives said the 19-yearold had paid an agent over $10,000 (£7,915) in the hopes of travelling to the UK to become a nail technician.
Reuters also reported the case of Nguyen Dinh Tu, who had been working illegally in Romania and in Germany but lost his job. He asked his wife to help raise £11,000 to fund the cost of his illegal passage from Germany to the UK.
“I lost contact with him on October 21,” Hoang Thi Thuong said. Relatives in the UK told his family that they were due to pick him up at the drop-off point. Then they found out that he was in the truck.
His family have heard nothing more from him.
‘Villagers say three separate lorries travelled in convoy with human cargo...’