Human cargo driven to frozen fate
Police are investigating a suspected Irish people-smuggling ring after 39 migrants were found frozen to death in the back of a refrigerated lorry.
One of UK’S biggest murder inquiries was opened yesterday after the bodies, including that of a teenager, were discovered in the vehicle on an industrial estate in Essex.
The container arrived at Purfleet, close to Tilbury Docks, from Zeebrugge, Belgium, at 12.30am yesterday. It left at 1.05am on the back of the lorry, which had entered the UK via Holyhead from Dublin four days earlier.
Just 35 minutes later the police were told the lorry was on an industrial estate in nearby Grays and that bodies had been found inside. The driver of the cab, named locally as Mo Robinson, 25, of Co Armagh in Northern Ireland, was arrested on suspicion of murder.
It is possible Robinson may have alerted the authorities himself, as sources close to the investigation told The Daily Telegraph it was ‘‘very unlikely’’ he knew of the plans to smuggle people across the border.
Temperatures in the refrigerated truck can get as low as -25C and sources said that the people inside had died from suspected hypothermia.
Boris Johnson said the perpetrators of the crime ‘‘should be hunted down’’ and Jackie Doyle-price, the MP for Thurrock, said putting ‘‘39 people into a locked metal container shows a contempt for human life that is evil’’ and the best way to honour their memory was to bring the perpetrators to justice.
Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, described it as a ‘‘truly shocking incident’’ and signalled she was willing to consider tougher sentences for human traffickers. ‘‘What we have seen through the actions of these traffickers is the worst of humanity,’’ she told MPS at the House of Commons.
Police were yesterday investigating links to Bulgaria as it emerged the truck’s cab was registered there in 2017. The country’s foreign ministry said it was registered in the port city of Varna, on the Black Sea, under the name of a company owned by an Irish woman, but that the cab had not returned in two years. The area is a known cigarette and fuel smuggling route with links to Irish Republican gangs.
The container has been linked to a firm with an office address in Dublin but is registered in Northern Ireland. Pippa Mills, deputy chief constable of Essex Police, said that ‘‘in order to ensure we maintain the dignity of the people who sadly lost their lives’’ they had moved the lorry, with the bodies still inside, to Tilbury Docks, as they started the ‘‘long process’’ of identification.
‘‘We are yet to identify them and must manage this sensitively,’’ she added. The nationality of the migrants and where they began their journey remained unclear.
The news came after repeated warnings about Britain’s porous borders and a crackdown on Calais to Dover migration routes. The National Crime Agency warned last year that Belgium was new frontier for illegal immigration. And Richard Burnett, the Road Haulage Association head, said yesterday that smugglers were considering other routes because of tighter security at Dover and Calais.
‘‘You’ve got heartbeat monitors, dogs, CO2. Those checks are done as you drive through,’’ he said.
Zeebrugge’s harbourmaster said they saw migrants trying to stow away ‘‘every day’’ at the Belgian port. – Telegraph Group