Security at Belgium port means victims likely got on before and were trapped for at least 10 hours

Row after row of shipping containers destined for British shores lined the sprawling Belgian industrial port at Zeebrugge. A little more than 48 hours earlier, 39 Chinese nationals had been hidden somewhere in the ranks of containers, waiting to begin a new life in the UK. Instead, the trailer became their tomb.

On Thursday, lorry drivers and officials at the port suggested the victims would have boarded the container – probably under the supervision of people smugglers – well away from Zeebrugge’s tight security.

Daniel Ionut, 26, a Romanian trucker who ferries goods between the Belgian port and Spain, told the Guardian he was saddened by the deaths. “In my opinion, they got inside [the container] on the road. Here it is impossible. They have cameras and controls,” he said.

His colleague, 31-year-old Sorin Emilian, agreed. He said he had alerted the police last year after discovering 16 migrants in the back of his truck at a petrol station in Brussels en route to Calais. “For all ports to the UK, this is a big problem – Calais, Dunkirk, Zeebrugge.”

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Zeebrugge port’s chief executive, Joachim Coens, also said it was unlikely the people were loaded into the container at the harbour. He said it would not have been checked internally once it passed through the port – suggesting the victims would have been trapped for about 10 hours from when the trailer arrived, at 2.49pm local time, to when it finished its journey in Essex that evening.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Left: Peter Degroote, Zeebrugge harbourmaster. Right: Ports chief executive Joachim Coens Photograph: Simon Murphy/The Guardian

“A refrigerated container in the port zone is completely sealed,” he told Belgian media. “During the check, the seal is examined, as is the licence plate. The driver is checked by cameras.”

The port chairman, Dirk De fauw, who is also the mayor of Bruges, indicated to local media that a refrigerated container would mean a scanner would not detect any heat inside.

Belgian prosecutors, who have opened a criminal inquiry, confirmed that the container arrived in Zeebrugge on Tuesday afternoon and travelled on to Purfleet in the UK, arriving in the early hours of Wednesday. “It is not yet clear when the victims were placed in the container and whether this happened in Belgium,” a statement from the federal public prosecutor’s office said.

Although it is unclear exactly how and when the victims gained access to it, Zeebrugge has past links to people-smuggling. A lorry carrying 58 Chinese migrants who suffocated 19 years ago in Dover had travelled from the busy port. Drivers and experts say that the problem has remained an issue ever since.

On Thursday morning a group of eight suspected migrants were taken away by police after some of them were seen trying to scale a fence at the port to get into a compound attached to a trucking firm.

The National Crime Agency warned in May that gangs were now using Belgian ports after French authorities tightened security across the border. In 2016, the Border Force specifically highlighted Zeebrugge as a key port of embarkation for migrants or trafficking victims heading to the UK.

Refugee charities in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern part of Belgium, said they had never or rarely encountered Chinese nationals. Migrants in northern France and Belgium usually come from war-torn or politically repressive countries in the Middle East and Africa.

Alexis Andries, the director of the Flanders branch of Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World), said better security at Zeebrugge port had led to increasing numbers of migrants attempting to board containers in lorry parks in the Belgian countryside.

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“There is a big need for safe migration routes. By closing the borders and making repression and control a way to address the problem, we will see more and more of these situations [in Essex] happening. Because when you increase controls … people will take more and more risks. That’s an evolution we are afraid of.”

Most of the people coming into contact with Médecins du Monde in Zeebrugge were asylum seekers rather than economic migrants, he said. “They are indeed escaping a situation of war or extreme conditions. Despite being protection-seekers, they are forced to take major risks in order to ask for protection.”

Clare Moseley, the chief executive of Care4Calais, which helps refugees in northern France and Belgium, said more people had been travelling to Brussels since the crackdown in Calais. “Refugees can’t stop coming because the things that they are fleeing from are too awful to stop fleeing from, so more security just leads to more people getting hurt. What we need is a better way of dealing with the issue,” she said.

As authorities continued to search for answers to explain how this tragedy occurred, Pierre Cybulski, a retired GP who also volunteers for Médecins du Monde, said it would not be the last. “It will happen again, of course,” he said, adding that policymakers needed to come together to tackle the issue. “It will not stop unless there is a political consensus.”