All 39 victims in UK people-smuggling tragedy are Chinese, police say
▶ The 38 adults and one child found in a container are thought to have frozen to death
Police raided three addresses in Northern Ireland and continued to question a 25-year-old man from the province over the deaths of 39 people, believed to be migrants from China, found in a refrigerated lorry on Wednesday.
The searches in County Armagh on Wednesday night are reportedly linked to the arrest of the driver, named in local reports as Mo Robinson, from Portadown.
A magistrate gave detectives another 24 hours to question the driver of the lorry. Police said identifying the victims and working out the circumstances around the deaths would be a lengthy and complex process.
“We have since confirmed that eight of the deceased are women and 31 are men and all are believed to be Chinese nationals,” Essex Police said, describing the case as the largest murder investigation it had yet carried out.
China’s foreign ministry said its embassy staff in London were heading to the scene “to verify this situation”.
Preliminary investigations, in what is the UK’s country’s largest murder investigation in more than a decade, appear to show that the container trailer arrived in Zeebrugge, Belgium mid-afternoon on Tuesday.
It left the port the same day for Purfleet, UK, where it arrived at 12.30am on Wednesday by ferry. It was collected by the tractor unit of the lorry, which had entered the UK on Sunday, October 20, from Dublin.
Police were called to the scene at Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays, Essex, at about 1.40am local time on Wednesday.
It is not yet clear where the container came from before it entered the Port of Zeebrugge or when the people inside died.
The authorities had previously said migrants were making increasingly risky attempts to enter the UK as it emerged the 38 adults and one child had frozen to death.
“This is an incredibly sensitive and high-profile investigation, and we are working swiftly to gather as full a picture as possible as to how these people lost their lives,” said deputy chief of Essex Police Pippa Mills.
A May report by the UK’s National Crime Agency said that in the past year there had been an
“increasing use of higher risk methods of clandestine entry. These include the movement of migrants (including children) into the UK in containers, refrigerated HGVs and small boats, at a high risk to life of those migrants smuggled”.
These attempts posed “a significant threat to life”, the NCA said.
A 2018 report by the agency said people smugglers continued to favour hard-sided refrigerated lorries. “Belgium has become a location of greater focus for the activities of organised people smugglers in the past year where smugglers of various nationalities operate.
“The number of smugglers located there increased after the closure of the migrant camp at Dunkirk in March 2017,” the NCA said.
Bulgaria confirmed that the lorry had licence plates issued by the country. Prime Minister Boyko Borisov said it was registered there in 2017 by an Irish citizen, and had not entered Bulgarian territory since.
“This is an unimaginable tragedy and truly heartbreaking,” UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said.
Mr Johnson said the perpetrators of people smuggling, trading in human lives, “should be hunted down and brought to justice”.
The deaths bring back memories from 2000 when 58 Chinese migrants suffocated in a lorry in Dover, England, after a months-long journey from China.