Catching the evil people smugglers
JUST after midnight on October 23, 2019, a lorry driver collected a ship container when it arrived in Purfleet from Belgium.
In the trailer were 39 Vietnamese migrants, who all died excruciating painful deaths, having suffocated during the fatal trip across the water, which saw temperatures hitting 40°C. The victims had tried to escape and also made final, desperate phone calls to family.
This compelling documentary follows how a 999 call from a lorry driver in Essex ended in one of the UK’s biggest ever police investigations.
Spanning Britain, Europe and Vietnam, the film shows how detectives cracked open a multimillion-pound international smuggling ring with its roots in a haulage business in Northern Ireland.
With exclusive access to Essex Police, including shocking bodycam footage and police interviews with suspects and officers, it shows how detectives painstakingly pieced together the evidence.
It all starts with a 1am 999 call. The lorry driver said he thought his trailer was empty, but heard a noise and opened it up to find dozens of people not breathing. 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.” Film-makers also travel to Vietnam to meet some of the relatives of the victims – desperate people hoping for a better life in the UK. Nguyen Thi Hong, whose husband Bui Phan Thang died, 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.”