Four men arrested in connection with the discovery of a lorry dumped in Austria in which 71 people perished

The driver of a lorry dumped by the side of a road in Austria with the bodies of 71 people inside has been arrested, Hungarian police said on Friday, amid indications that those trapped in the vehicle including four children had suffocated to death.



The victims appeared to have been mostly Syrians fleeing war and, on the final leg of their long journey, hoping for a better life in Europe. Hans Peter Doskozil, police chief for the Austrian province of Burgenland, said one Syrian travel document had been found but it was too early to say from which countries the entire group had come.

Of the 71 dead, 59 were men, eight were women and four children, he said. They included a girl of between one and two, and three boys aged between eight and 10.

Three Bulgarians and an Afghan were detained, Hungarian police said. One had been charged with human trafficking. All four would appear in a Hungarian court on Saturday, authorities said, where it would be decided whether they could be held beyond an initial 72-hour period.

Those arrested included the owner of the vehicle and two drivers, and were likely “low-ranking members … of a Bulgarian-Hungarian human-trafficking gang”, said police spokesman Hans Peter Doskozil.

About 20 witnesses had been interviewed and houses searched, the authorities added. Detectives in Austria identified the owner of the refrigerated truck as a Bulgarian of Lebanese origin.

The lorry had set off from the Hungarian capital, Budapest, in the early hours of Wednesday morning and arrived at the border at about 9am. It crossed into Austria at night. It was spotted at about 5am or 6am on Thursday, abandoned on the hard shoulder of the A4 motorway between Neusiedl and Parndorf.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Police and forensic officers surround a lorry in Austria, where the decomposing bodies of dozens of refugees were discovered on Thursday morning

The victims almost certainly took the same arduous western Balkans route, via Turkey, Greece and Macedonia, as thousands of other refugees. According to the International Office of Migration (IOM), the Hungarian authorities routinely remove migrants from trains and buses bound for Austria and Germany.

“They [refugees] have resorted to smugglers, as no other means of transport is available to them,” Magdalena Majkowska-Tomkin of IOM’s office in Hungary said.

The IOM’s director, William Swing, added: “Just as we have seen on the Mediterranean for these last three years, the spectre of death now haunts the European continent. Something must be done, and soon, to make all migration safe and legal.”

Austrian police said those trapped inside the lorry appeared to have perished before they entered the country. A large hole was found on one side of the vehicle’s rear area. It was unclear if this was made by smugglers or by the refugees trying to get out.

Autopsies were being carried out to discover the cause of death, with the strong probability all were asphyxiated.



In Libya, meanwhile, at least 105 refugees were feared dead after two boats capsized on Thursday soon after leaving the port of Zuwara. Libya’s coastguard said it had pulled dozens of bodies from the water and towed a flooded boat into harbour. The boat contained drowned victims floating face down, one wearing a life-vest.

The grim details came at the end of another dismal week, during which European leaders have blamed each other for the escalating migration crisis, there has been no firm agreement on a Franco-German plan to introduce a refugee quota system among EU member states, and the death toll this year has surpassed 2,500.



Speaking on Friday, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said EU leaders could hold a special summit on the refugee crisis, but only if “certain decisions” can be reached. Germany says it expects to accept 800,000 asylum seekers this year, more than any other European state, and wants the burden shared more equitably among all EU countries.

At an acrimonious summit in June, EU leaders failed to agree a new system of mandatory quotas for refugees. Spain and most of eastern Europe rejected modest proposals made by Brussels to introduce quotas on a small initial scale.

A laboratory for refugee politics: inside Passau, the 'German Lampedusa' Read more

In the absence of meaningful political agreement, individual states have been taking their own unilateral steps to deal with the problem. In a continent where walls came tumbling down at the end of the cold war, two and a half decades ago, new barriers are being rapidly erected.

Hungary – the entry point to the EU and the Schengen area – is erecting a fence along its border with Serbia. Bulgaria is building its own wall with Turkey. This week, Estonia announced it is constructing a barrier to keep out Russia. Ukraine – which has lost control of part of its eastern border to Kremlin-led rebels – wants to build a wall along its border with Russia, too.

The sheer scale of the problem confronting the EU was underlined by figures from the UN’s refugee agency revealing that 300,000 people have crossed from the Mediterranean to Europe so far this year. This compares with 219,000 for the whole of 2014. The rate of those arriving in southern Europe is running at 3,000 people a day, it adds.



Thursday’s lorry tragedy has led to recriminations as to which country bears most responsibility for the smugglers. Austrian police said that the traffickers appeared to be part of a Bulgarian-Hungarian mafia gang. One of those arrested had Hungarian papers, though his exact nationality was unclear, they added.

The Hungarian authorities, however, have denied that any of those arrested are Hungarian. On Friday, János Lázár, the minister in the prime minister’s office, said the truck had a temporary licence plate registered to a Romanian citizen from the city of Kecskemét. Romania’s foreign ministry insisted none of its citizens was involved.

The county of Bács-Kiskun appears to be at the centre of the people smuggling operation in Hungary. Three police officers based in the county – of which Kecskemét is the largest town – were recently arrested by Hungarian security service agents for helping smugglers to evade police patrols.

Nazli Avdan, an expert on migration at the University of Kansas, said: “Hungary’s recent endeavours to quickly construct a fence across its border showcases that Europe has no concerted or coordinated plan in mind when coping with involuntary migration.”



With AFP