How cargo-of-death gang were nailed
JUST after midnight on October 23, 2019, a lorry driver collected a container from Purfleet ferry port on the Thames.
Inside were 39 Vietnamese migrants, who all died excruciating deaths, suffocating during the fatal trip from Belgium in temperatures hitting 40C.
The victims had tried to escape and made final, desperate phone calls to family. This compelling documentary follows how a 999 call from the lorry driver in Essex ended in one of the UK’s biggest ever police investigations.
Spanning Britain, Europe and Vietnam, the probe cracked open a multi-million-pound international people-smuggling ring with its roots in a haulage business in Northern Ireland.
With exclusive access to Essex Police files, including shocking bodycam footage and interviews with suspects and officers, it shows how detectives pieced together the evidence.
It all starts with that 1am call from the driver who said he thought his trailer was empty, but heard a noise and opened it to find dozens of people dead.
Four men, including this driver, were later jailed for manslaughter.
PC Jack Emerson, first responder to the horrifying scene, says: “There were three or four seconds of just trying to process what we were seeing. No one knew what to say.”
Also telling the human stories, filmmakers travel to Vietnam to meet some of the relatives of the victims – all desperate people hoping for a better life in the UK.
Nguyen Thi Hong, whose husband Bui Phan Thang died in the container, says: “We were struggling. He said, ‘Daddy doesn’t want to leave mummy and the three children’.
“But we knew if he didn’t go, life would always be hard.”