Dead migrants were all Chinese
ALL 39 people found dead in a refrigerated container truck near an English port were Chinese citizens, British police confirmed yesterday as they investigated one of the country’s deadliest cases of people smuggling.
The Essex Police force said 31 men and eight women had been found dead in the truck at an industrial park in Grays, a town 40km east of London, early on Wednesday.
The 25-year-old truck driver, who is from Northern Ireland, was being questioned on suspicion of attempted murder but has not been charged. Police in Northern Ireland also searched three properties as they sought to piece together how the truck’s cab, its container and the victims came together.
The truck and container apparently took separate journeys before ending up at the industrial park. British police said they believed the container had gone from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge to Purfleet, England, where it arrived early on Wednesday and was picked up by the truck driver and driven the few miles to Grays.
The truck cab, which is registered in Bulgaria to a company owned by an Irish woman, is believed to have come from Northern Ireland, then headed to Dublin to catch a ferry to Wales before driving across Britain to pick up the container.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Chinese embassy employees in the UK were driving to the scene of the crime to aid the investigation. Belgian police are trying to track down information from Zeebrugge.
Groups of migrants have repeatedly landed on English shores using small boats for the risky Channel crossing and migrants are sometimes found in the trunks of cars that disembark from the massive ferries that link France and England. But Wednesday’s macabre find was a reminder that criminal gangs are still profiting from large-scale trafficking.
The tragedy recalls the deaths of 58 Chinese migrants who suffocated in a truck in Dover, England, in 2000 after a perilous, months-long journey from China’s southern Fujian province. They were found stowed away with a cargo of tomatoes after a ferry ride from Zeebrugge, the same Belgian port that featured in the latest tragedy.
Nando Sigona, a professor of migration studies at the University of Birmingham, said tougher migration controls born of populist anti-immigrant sentiment across Europe were closing down less dangerous routes to the West and encouraging smugglers to take more risks and try out new routes.
“The fact that all these people came from the same country could hint to a more organised crime scenario,” he said. “Usually, if it’s an ad hoc arrangement at the port, you would get a bit of a mix of nationalities.”
Smugglers – many of whom are paid their final instalment only when the people is delivered to their destination – earn more by packing as many people as possible into a ship or truck.
“Death is a side effect,” Sigona said. In February 2004, 21 Chinese migrants – also from Fujian – who were working as cockle-pickers in Britain drowned when they were caught by treacherous tides in Morecambe Bay in north-west England.
UK authorities have warned for several years that people smugglers are turning to Dutch and Belgian ports because of increased security measures on the busiest cross-Channel trade route between the ports of Calais in France and Dover in England.
| AP