Men jailed after 71 migrants die in truck

Four human traffickers have been sentenced to 25 years in prison each after 71 migrants suffocated to death in the back of a refrigerated truck found on a highway in Austria.

The main defendant, an Afghan man, and three Bulgarian accomplices, were found guilty at a court in Hungary of being part of a criminal organisation and committing multiple crimes, including human smuggling and murder.

Ten other defendants, mostly Bulgarians, were given prison terms ranging between three and 12 years.

The horrific case saw 59 men, eight women and four children from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan suffocated in the back of a refrigerated truck with Hungarian licence plates. The truck was found abandoned in the emergency lane of the A4 highway near Parndorf, Austria, near the Hungarian border in 2015. Around 400,000 migrants and refugees passed through Hungary in 2015 on their way to Germany and other destinations in Western Europe.