A LONG JOURNEY AHEAD
A refugee girl moves under razor wire as she crosses from Serbia to Hungary, in Roszke, Thursday. It is estimated that more than 10,000 migrants, including many women with babies and small children, have crossed into Serbia during the past few days and he
As regional leaders met Thursday to tackle Europe’s refugee crisis, a gruesome discovery unfolded a short drive from the Austrian capital: An abandoned truck with at least 20 — and possibly up to 50 — decomposing bodies of migrants piled inside.
It was the latest tragedy in a year that has seen tens of thousands of people risking all to seek a better life or refuge in wealthy European countries. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the Vienna conference she was “shaken by the awful news,” and summit participants held a minute of silence.
“This reminds us that we in Europe need to tackle the problem quickly,” Merkel said.
Migrants fearful of death at sea in overcrowded and flimsy boats as they flee turmoil and war in the Middle East have increasingly turned to using a land route to Europe through the Western Balkans. But the discovery of the bodies in the truck on the main highway connecting Vienna to the Hungarian capital of Budapest showed there is no truly safe path. Thousands cross from Greece daily with the help of smugglers, aiming to reach European Union countries like Germany, Austria or Sweden and apply for asylum. The human traffickers may charge thousands of dollars per person, only to stuff them into trucks and vans so tightly that they often cannot move — or breathe.
Austrian police declined to say what killed those found in the truck, pending an investigation.
The state of decomposition made establishing identities and even the exact number of dead difficult. Senior police official Hans Peter Doskozil said that “20, 30, 40 — maybe 50” corpses were inside.
The truck was towed to an airconditioned location near the border with Hungary where authorities would open it once temperatures had cooled enough to begin removing the bodies, said Doskozil.
Autopsies would be conducted in the capital later, he said.
Officials found the driverless truck shortly before noon on the highway shoulder about 40 kilometres east of Vienna, near the town of Parndorf, and they originally believed it had mechanical trouble, said police spokesman Helmut Marban. Then they saw blood dripping from the cargo area and noticed the smell of dead bodies, he said.
Police quickly realized there were no survivors, Doskozil said.
Information from Hungarian police indicated the truck was east of Budapest early Wednesday and entered Austria overnight before being abandoned, he told reporters.
The condition of the bodies indicated the victims may have died before the truck entered Austria, he added.
The truck apparently used to belong to the Slovak company Hyza, which sells chicken meat and is part of Agrofert Holding, owned by Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babis. Agrofert Holding, in a statement, said it had sold the truck in 2014. The new owners did not remove Hyza’s logos, and the company said it had nothing to do with the truck now.
News of the tragedy spread quickly to the thousands of migrants travelling on foot and by vehicle from Serbia into Hungary, a major entry point for EU asylumseekers.
They said they had heard stories before of smugglers lying to clients and dropping them far short of their promised destination or of abandoning them, sometimes still locked in trucks.
But they felt there often was little choice but to take such risks, given the physical toll of walking many kilometres — often guided only by a map on a smartphone.