Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Traffickers held after 71 dead in truck
Children’s bodies found
EISENSTADT, Austria: Four children, including a baby girl, were among 71 migrants found dead in a truck on an Austrian highway, and several people have been arrested in Hungary in connection with the tragedy, Austrian police said yesterday.
An Austrian motorway patrol discovered the abandoned truck near the Hungarian border on Thursday, probably at least 24 hours after it had been parked there.
The refugees appeared to have been dead for up to two days and fluids from the decomposing bodies were seeping from its door.
A Syrian travel document was found among the victims but more time is needed to determine whether people of other nationalities were on board, Hans Peter Doskozil, police chief for the province of Burgenland, told a news conference.
The back door of the truck was not locked but secured shut with wires. Its refrigeration system showed no signs of having been switched on and there were no vents to allow fresh air inside, Doskozil told Reuters.
The victims had been wearing light summer clothes.
Of the 71 dead, 59 were men, eight were women, and four were children, including a girl estimated at 1-2 years old and three boys aged roughly 8-10.
Austrian and Hungarian police differed over the number of arrests made in the case.
Doskozil said three people had been taken into custody in Hungary, including one man who is believed to be the owner of the truck and is of Bulgarian-Lebanese origin.
The other two are believed to have driven the vehicle. One was described as Bulgarian and the other had a Hungarian identity card.
Hungarian police said they had arrested four men, including three Bulgarians and an Afghan citizen, and had questioned roughly 20 people after conducting house searches.
“We expect that this is the trace that will lead us to the perpetrators,” Doskozil said, making clear that the people being held were not the ringleaders of the trafficking gang.
Authorities were transporting the bodies to different Austrian morgues. A witness saw one truck carrying around 10 bodies entering a Vienna forensics centre.
The truck in which the bodies were found belongs to a company called Mastermobiliker, which has been under bankruptcy proceedings since July last year, according to a Hungarian company register.
The truck bore the logo of what appeared to be a Slovak company, Hyza. Its parent group, Agrofert, told Reuters the vehicle was sold to Mastermobiliker in January this year.
About 100 000 migrants, many of them from Syria and other conflict zones in the Middle East, have taken the Balkan route into Europe this year, heading via Serbia for Hungary and Europe’s Schengen zone of passport-free travel.
Most then move on to richer countries such as Austria and Germany. Austria saw asylum requests rise to more than 28,000 in the first six months of this year – more than the total for all of last year.
Doskozil said plans by Hungary to build a 175m fence to keep out refugees may be con- tributing to the problem.
“Many people are trying to get to Germany or Austria before it ( the fence) is finished,” Doskozil said.
Austria’s interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said the best way to handle the refugee crisis was to create legal pathways into Europe rather than tighten border controls.
The 28 member states of the EU have not yet agreed on introducing binding quotas for the distribution of refugees. EU leaders declared this week the bloc had “failed” in the face of human agony on its frontiers.
The UN refugee agency UNHCR said the number of refugees and migrants trying to get to Europe by crossing the Mediterranean has passed 300 000 this year, up from 219 000 in the whole of last year.
● In Palermo, Italian police detained 10 men yesterday on suspicion of multiple homicide and aiding illegal immigration after 52 migrants were found suffocated in the hold of a boat this week, a Sicilian prosecutor said.
Police in Palermo stopped the suspects after they arrived with the corpses of the victims and hundreds of survivors on the Swedish coastguard ship Poseidon.
Rescuers found the bodies trapped under the deck of a wooden boat this week.
Seven Moroccans, two Syrians and one Libyan, all acting as crew on the boat, were charged with murder based on testimony from some of the more than 500 migrants on board.
Ten survivors said they had been trapped in the hull, which was 1.5m high and 4m long, Palermo prosecutor Maurizio Scala said.
They were kicked, punched and threatened with knives if they tried to get out.
“They were all forced to stay in hellish conditions below decks,” Scala said.
The prosecutor’s office said in a statement the deaths were caused by oxygen deprivation and inhaling engine fumes, as well as the actions of the crew. – Reuters