Four arrested in truck deaths
The vehicle left on an Austrian road held the bodies of 71 migrants, apparently Syrian.
LONDON — A truck found abandoned on an Austrian highway contained the bodies of 71 migrants, and four suspects in the case have been arrested in Hungary, Austrian and Hungarian authorities said Friday.
The victims appear to have been Syrian refugees and to have died of suffocation, said Hans Peter Doskozil, chief of police in the eastern Austrian state of Burgenland. The bodies — 59 men, eight women and four children: a 1- or 2-year-old girl and three boys ages 8 to 10 — were partially decomposed.
Hungarian police said that they had arrested three Bulgarian nationals and one Afghan in connection with the case.
Doskozil said one of the three Bulgarians was apparently of Lebanese descent and the owner of the refrigerated truck, which formerly belonged to a Slovakia-based meat-transporting company.
The vehicle and its gruesome contents were discovered Thursday on the side of a highway connecting Austria and Hungary. Many of the thousands of migrants who have been landing in southern Europe are desperate to reach richer northern nations such as Germany and Sweden, which have taken in much larger numbers of refugees than their neighbors and offer more generous benefits.
In recent months, many migrants hoping to reach Europe have switched from perilous sea crossings from North Africa to mostly overland routes from Greece and through Balkan nations such as Macedonia and Serbia. While many are refugees from the civil war raging in Syria, others are fleeing violence, instability or poverty in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Eritrea.
Doskozil said a travel document found on one of the bodies suggests that the migrants were from Syria. They do not appear to be African.
More than 310,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe so far this year, eclipsing the total for all of 2014, according to the United Nations. About 200,000 migrants have landed in Greece alone. The crossings of the Mediterranean from North Africa to Italy have been the deadliest, with about 2,500 people killed or disappeared making the attempt this year.
The number of people perishing on overland crossings has been tiny in comparison. But the truckload of bodies found Thursday opened another chapter of danger and despair in Europe’s swelling migrant crisis.
The discovery, near the eastern Austrian town of Parndorf, was made Thursday morning just as the leaders of Germany and several Balkan nations were meeting less than 30 miles away in Vienna to discuss the crisis.
Doskozil, the police chief, said the truck appeared to have begun its journey Wednesday near Budapest and crossed into Austria sometime that night. By the time authorities examined the vehicle Thursday morning, the people in the back might already have been dead for as long as 48 hours.
Hungary has become a magnet for migrants because it belongs to the European Union’s vast passportfree travel zone that stretches from Greece to France but that excludes most Balkan nations. The government in Budapest is trying to block migrants entering from nonEU neighbor Serbia by building a fence, including razor wire, along the nearly 110-mile-long border between the two countries.
But thousands have slipped through anyway, including 3,200 detained by Hungarian authorities Wednesday, the most in a single day for the Central European nation during the crisis.
The Hungarian government is also trying to crack down on human-smuggling rings, which have often shown scant concern for the lives of those who pay them.
“This tragedy underscores the ruthlessness of smugglers who have expanded their business from the Mediterranean Sea to the highways of Europe,” said Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva. “It shows they have no regard for human life and are only after profit.”