Haulage boss and wife held over lorry tragedy ... after saying they’d sold truck
Heartbreaking texts from young woman feared to be among victims as families who paid up to £30k to buy them a new life in Britain tell of their nightmare
THREE more people – including an Irish haulage boss and his wife – were yesterday arrested in connec-tion with the deaths of 39 migrants who perished in the back of a lorry.
As a massive police investigation gathered pace, Joanna and Thomas Maher, 38, were held on suspicion of manslaughter and conspiracy to traf-fic people.
A 48- year- old man from Northern Ire-land was arrested at Stansted airport on suspicion of the same offences.
The married couple were taken into custody during a dramatic early morning raid on their £ 400,000 suburban home in Warrington, Cheshire.
Mrs Maher was named in documents as the owner of the Scania cab, which was reg-istered in Bulgaria and was being driven by 25- year- old trucker Mo Robinson.
The Northern Irishman discov-ered the dozens of dead migrants in the back of the container on Wednesday morning after picking it up off a ferry in Purfleet, Essex.
Mr Robinson was arrested on suspicion of murder and has remained in custody ever since.
Hours before their arrest the Mahers told the Daily Mail they had nothing to do with the tragedy and had sold the truck to another Irish business, which they refused to name, last year.
It is understood the couple, who have three children aged under 20, moved to Warrington from Ireland around five years ago.
Mr Maher, a former lorry driver, is the director of two UK firms – Thomas Maher Transport ( TMT) Ltd and a hairdressing salon, New Hair Don’t Care, also based in the Cheshire town.
According to their latest accounts, the firms have total net assets of around £ 17,000.
Neighbours said the pair drive cars worth more than £ 150,000, including a white sporty Chevrolet Corvette and two grey Land Rover SUVS with personalised number plates. The Mahers spent more than £ 100,000 on an extension and renovations to the four- bedroomed property before they moved in two years ago.
They go on regular foreign holi-days and also have a second home in Spain. The couple’s social media pages show pictures of them both wearing designer clothes and enjoying meals out. Yesterday police officers spent several hours searching the cou-ple’s home and the hair salon, which is around three miles away.
The Mahers had told the Mail that their Bulgaria- based busi-ness, Today’s Movements Tomor-row, was sold to a firm in County Monaghan, Ireland, not far from where truck driver Robinson lives with his pregnant hairdresser partner, last October.
‘ I went to the British police as we were registered owners [ of the cab] in Bulgaria,’ Mr Maher, who suffers from heart problems, said before his arrest.
‘ I phoned them myself. They were happy we had come forward. They are well aware of who they are deal-ing with in southern Ireland. It’s not nice to be associated with this. It’s disgusting what’s happened.’
Senior police sources in the Irish Republic have confirmed that they are probing ‘ at least’ two brothers from a well- known Armagh family, but who live in County Monaghan, in connection with the Essex tragedy.
One line of inquiry is believed to be whether the brothers were involved in hiring the refrigerated trailer, owned by Dublin- based Global Trailer Rentals Ltd ( GTR). It was leased out on October 15 from GTR’S yard, also in County Monaghan, for £ 238 a week.
When approached by the Mail at his large, detached home a few miles into the Republic, one of the brothers refused to comment and ordered a reporter off his property. There is not thought to have been any police activity focusing on their premises since the bodies were found in Essex.
GTR’S directors Mark and Kay Devlin have insisted they had no knowledge the trailer would be used to smuggle migrants, saying they were ‘ shell- shocked’ and ‘ gut-ted’ following the tragedy. Neigh-bours of the Mahers told of their shock following the couple’s 4am arrest yesterday.
One said the couple ‘ spent around £ 150,000 completely gutting the place’ before they moved in two years ago.
‘ They have a house in Spain and they go to all sorts of places, like Mexico,’ the neighbour said.
‘ We heard loads of banging and we saw a police car outside. We wondered what was going on because they were meant to be going off on holiday.’
Businessman Ivan Jelyazkov, who helped the Mahers register their business in Bulgaria, said the couple were ‘ honest people’.
He said Mrs Maher visited the Black Sea port city of Varna as recently as May 2018 to re- register the lorry cab, which is also insured until 2020.
Mr Jelyazkov said: ‘ I knew the couple well, they are my friends, everything is legitimate. I have known them for many years. They are honest people.’
‘ It’s disgusting what’s happened’ ‘ They are honest people’
TRAPPED inside a lorry and struggling for air, a desperate woman sent what she knew would be the final messages to her family.
The 26-year-old told her mother she was sorry, that her dream of a new life abroad had gone horrifically wrong, and that she was dying, writing: ‘I can’t breathe.’
Last night the parents of Pham Thi Tra My said they feared she was among the 39 migrants who died in horrendous conditions in the back of a lorry.
They shared her last messages in the hope of discovering if their daughter was one of the dozens trapped inside the refrigerated container which would become a metal coffin.
The Vietnamese family was one of up to ten believed to have come forward saying they feared their relatives were missing after the grim discovery in Essex.
Another victim feared to have been caught up in the tragedy is a 20-year-old Vietnamese man, Nguyen Dinh Luong, whose family had also said they received urgent messages from two phones.
In her final messages, Tra My wrote: ‘ So sorry Mum. My route to abroad does not succeed. Mum, I love you so much. I am dying because I can’t breathe. I am from Can Loc,
Ha Tinh, Vietnam. Mum, I’m very sorry.’ She may have included her hometown in these last desperate words to help rescuers to identify her. If someone found her phone and read the messages, they could work out where she had travelled from so her family could be told of her fate.
The heartbreaking messages – translated here into English – were sent at 10.30pm on Tuesday, as the container crossed the Channel on board a cargo ferry from Zeebrugge in Belgium to Purfleet docks on the Thames.
The refrigerated container was sealed before it was loaded onto the ferry, meaning those inside had been trapped for at least eight hours before the messages were sent.
Tra My’s family, who are from the rural Ha Tinh province of Vietnam, said they paid up to £30,000 for her to be smuggled to Britain, via China.
Relatives said she left her home in Ha Tinh province on October 3 to start her long journey to Britain. She intended to travel to China and then to fly to France before trying to get to England. The family said the smuggling gang masters had banned her from receiving any phone calls.
Her brother, Pham Ngoc Tuan, said she had stayed in China for a few days and then flew to France and travelled on to Belgium, and called her family from each country.
He told the BBC she had made a first attempt to reach Britain last Saturday but had been caught and turned back. ‘My sister went missing on October 23 and we couldn’t contact her,’ he said. ‘We are concerned she may be in that trailer.
‘We are asking the British police to help investigate so that my sister can be returned to the family.’
Relatives of Dinh Luong said they had also received urgent messages from two phones, although they did not disclose the content of the messages.
His brother told the BBC that Dinh Luong left Vietnam a year ago and had been in France, and shared a photograph of the young man outside the Sacre Coeur cathedral in Paris.
A third Vietnamese family said a 19-year- old woman was missing after calling relatives at 6.20am on Tuesday to say she was getting into a container and was turning off her phone to avoid detection. Some of the families said the smugglers had returned their money after learning of the deaths.
Hoa Nghiem, of the Human Rights Space group in Hanoi, said seven families from Tra My’s home province of Ha Tinh had contacted the group over fears for missing relatives.
She shared Tra My’s photograph and a screen grab of her last messages on Twitter – with her family’s consent – in a bid to ask for international help for those missing.
‘We don’t know if they are in that Essex truck,’ she said. ‘We hope they are not. But these people went to China and would go to the UK from there.’
Ha Tinh is an impoverished coastal province which was devastated by an environmental disaster in 2016, when a chemical spill poisoned up to 125 miles of coastline. The region relied on fishing and seafood exports and families’ livelihoods were destroyed overnight. Trafficking experts said there was an immediate increase in migration from the area as poverty forced families to send their sons and daughters abroad to find work. Mimi Vu said many travelled via China en route to Britain,
and often carried falsified Chinese passports.
In Vietnam, the average wage is only around £150 a month, and socalled ‘snakehead’ gangs promise earnings of £2,000 a month for those who travel to Britain.
Desperate families sell their homes and belongings and take out loans to pay the gangs in the belief that their relatives will be able to repay the money once they reach Europe.
The identities of the eight women and 31 men found inside the container have not yet been revealed.
‘Container had been sealed’
The bodies of more of the victims were driven away from Tilbury docks yesterday in undertakers’ vehicles.
They were taken to Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford, Essex, for postmortem examinations to try to establish the cause of death. After the bodies were found at Purfleet on Wednesday, police moved the lorry to nearby Tilbury so they could be removed from the container in private.
Essex Police launched its biggest ever murder investigation after the grim discovery.
The force originally said it believed the victims were Chinese, but its deputy chief constable, Pippa Mills, said yesterday that the force would give no more details about the nationalities of the victims until formal identification had taken place.
‘We gave an initial steer on Thursday on nationality, however this is now a developing picture,’ she said. ‘As such I will not be drawn on any further detail until formal identification processes have taken place.’
She added: ‘I would also like to make an appeal to anyone living illegally in this country, who could help our investigation. Please come forward and speak to us without fear.
‘I can assure you that your information will be received in strictest confidence and no criminal action will be taken against you.’
Snakehead smuggling gangs in China are known to run human trafficking routes to Britain and it is possible the victims were carrying Chinese documentation.