In August the decomposing bodies of 71 migrants were found in an abandoned truck in Austria. In the most complete account to date, we tell the story of one of the victims, Saeed Othman Mohammed, and how he came to die

Late in the evening of Monday 24 August, Saeed Othman Mohammed called home. He was in Hungary, Saeed told his family, and that night he hoped smugglers would drive him to Germany. Then he hung up.

It was the last time Saeed’s family heard from him. A month prior, Saeed had left home, 2,240 miles (3,600km) away in Iraqi Kurdistan. The grey-haired mechanic hoped to get to Germany to fix his diseased kidney. At frequent intervals throughout the journey, he had checked in with his relatives. But from this point on, they heard nothing.

Not even the smugglers seemed to know where he was. Four days later, Saeed’s brother Mohammed called the man who had organised the trip, Jamal Qamishi. “I swear, brother, I have no news,” Qamishi said. “When I get some news, I’ll let you know, 100%.”

But the news, when it finally arrived during the second week of September, was not from Qamishi. It was from the Austrian police. Saeed, the Austrians said, was among 71 people found dead in the back of a refrigerated food truck with a slogan on the side that read: “Honest Chicken”. The van had been discovered on the roadside in Parndorf, Austria, on 27 August. But some of the bodies were so badly decomposed, and the situation so confused, that it had taken several days to identify them.

This is the story of how one of them – Saeed Othman Mohammed – came to die there. Pieced together from interviews with relatives, travel companions and smugglers, it is the first extended account of an event that woke Europe to the proximity of the migration crisis – but which has until now remained a mystery.

It’s a story that begins in mid-summer, in Sulaimaniya, the second-biggest city in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region. Thousands have fled Iraq this year for Europe, helping to form the biggest mass-migration the continent has seen since the second world war. The vast majority of the refugees are Syrians, Afghans, and Eritreans – many of them fleeing war and political repression.

But Saeed and his friends from Sulaimaniya had other reasons to join the exodus. Islamic State had overrun large parts of Iraq – but the city of Sulaimaniya was not one of them. Instead, Saeed wanted treatment for his last remaining, decaying kidney. He was 35, but looked a decade older, perhaps a side-effect of his condition.

People smuggler Jamal Qamishi

Then there was the pervasive corruption. Saeed had joined pro-democracy protests in 2011 that ultimately led nowhere. He joined one political party, and then another – but he found both of them ineffectual and corrupt.

“I have no future in this place,” Saeed told his friend Bahman Abubakr, as the two smoked shisha pipes in a cafe after work in June. An even grander declaration followed: Saeed saw his future in Germany. He had no grand vision of what he would do there, but he knew he liked BMW, and wondered if he could run a carwash there, or trade in secondhand phones.



The path to Europe is one long trodden by Kurds. Since the 1970s, small waves of people have fled Iraqi Kurdistan for Europe for political and economic reasons, creating an industry in people smuggling. But not everyone made it. Saeed had tried the route in 2006 but was arrested in Turkey and sent back home.

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The first step was a conversation with Qamishi, the 46-year-old owner of a local tourism company. Qamishi lived in Bulgaria for five years in the 90s, and has been back and forth ever since. Now he claims to focus exclusively on tourism, but over the years Qamishi developed a reputation as someone who could get people to Europe through means other than a package holiday.

Some would-be migrants pay as they go: $1,000 to the person who gets them across the Aegean to Greece; perhaps €200 to the man who drives them to the Macedonian border. It’s a more complicated process. But it gives refugees more flexibility, and means they don’t have to rely as much on smugglers.

But others – like Saeed’s group of 14 – prefer a simpler set-up. And this is what Qamishi offers: a huge lump-sum payment in exchange for organising the whole route to Germany. Jamal the Guarantee, they call him. The man who will guarantee you will get to your destination.

Like many smugglers, Qamishi says he does it with a heavy heart. He was out of the game for five years, he says, and helped this particular group only because he was related to three of them. “Their families called me and told me to arrange it for them,” Qamishi said. “I told them I had given up on smuggling – but they insisted.”

This year seemed different. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians blazed a trail across the tiny stretch of water between Turkey and Greece, while others braved the land border with Bulgaria. Suddenly what had seemed an impossible journey now appeared to be comparatively straightforward. So when 13 of Saeed’s friends thought they would try their luck at it, Saeed decided to join them.

Retired or not, Qamishi still had the connections. For $9,500 he said he could get Saeed and his friends to Germany. It would be a 10-day journey, he promised, and barring a 22-hour walk in Bulgaria, they would be taken by car.

Saeed had the money, which he had saved up during long years as a mechanic and then as an engineer for a telecoms company. He took the cash to the foreign exchange market in Sulaimaniya and deposited it with a dealer whom the smuggler trusted. When Saeed reached Germany, he would call the dealer and ask him to wire the money to the smuggler or his associates.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Left to right: Bahman Abubakr, Ahmad Saeed’s elder brother, Saeed’s sister-in-law and nieces, Saeed Othman and unidentified friends and family.

Wednesday 22 July was the day Saeed finally set out. In the morning, at about 10am, his brothers, sisters, and best friend Bahman gathered at the family home to give him a send-off. Standing on the balcony, they posed for one final photograph. Saeed grinned, but there was a hint of fear in his face. His family’s smiles looked more like grimaces. “We were suffering,” his elder brother Ahmad recalled, “but we had to pretend we were happy for him.”

Ahmad made one final attempt to persuade Saeed to stay, fearing he was too ill to travel. But it was in vain. In the minutes before leaving, Saeed stood before the vehicle that was shortly to take him to the Turkish border, and recorded a video. After criticising the Kurdish authorities and blaming them for the area’s woes, Saeed stared into the camera and said: “God willing, we will go – and won’t come back.”

By 1pm, the 14 friends were speeding towards Turkey in two vehicles. By the evening, they were at the border, and three hours later they had reached the southern Turkish city of Diyarbakır. The following day, a one-hour flight brought them to Istanbul in the north-west of the country, close to Greece and Bulgaria.

It was then that Qamishi called two Kurdish colleagues in Bulgaria. Their passengers were ready, he said, and promised them €7,900 for every person they smuggled. After checking with a relative in Sulaimaniya that the money had been deposited with the foreign exchange dealer, the pair came to fetch Saeed’s group from Istanbul.

The group moved fast. By the evening of 23 July, 18 hours after leaving home, they was in the countryside near the Bulgarian border. In the early hours of Friday 24 July, they walked into Bulgaria. After a four-hour hike, they were stopped by nine uniformed men who drove cars marked with police insignia. The nine men beat them and stole their phones and money, prompting them to return to Turkey.

A few days later, the group tried again. This time, most of the 14 passed through undetected: one is now in Finland, another in Austria. But Saeed, again, was unlucky. Bulgarian police caught him and three others, including his friend Shwana, and held them in the border town of Svilengrad. A police mugshot shows Saeed was in police custody by 28 July, going by the assumed name of Ali Mohamed Mustafa. He looks tired, but defiant – and even contemptuous.

Later, the foursome were transferred to a refugee detention camp. They stayed there for nearly a month until they were released around 21 August. Their friends had long since reached central Europe.

Finally free, Saeed called a man named Barzan, one of the Qamishi’s associates. Barzan led Saeed’s friends over the border with Serbia with another group of travellers. Spirits were still high. Saeed sent his family a picture of the group in a forest. Most of them are smiling, one flashes a thumbs-up, another raises a victory sign.

They had good reason to be happy: crossing the Serbian border was straightforward. Once in Serbia, Barzan handed them to another smuggler, who took them easily to Hungary.

It was then, on 24 August, that things began to unravel. In Hungary, Saeed and his friends were entrusted to another Kurdish smuggler called Karwan Hussein. He was supposed to be the fifth and final link in a tried-and-tested network that snaked from Iraq to Austria. But in reality, Qamishi says he had never met Hussein. And already, Saeed’s relatives were hearing bad things about him.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Karwan Hussein, a Kurdish people smuggler.

Ari, one of Saeed’s initial travelling companions, had crossed Bulgaria in July without getting caught. Now safe in Austria, he gave Saeed’s brother Mohammed a call. Alarm bells started ringing when Ari mentioned a near-death experience in the back of the truck that brought him from Hungary to Austria – Ari had almost suffocated.

Saeed was meant to avoid a similar fate. When he called, late in the evening of 24 August, he asked his brother to deliver an extra €600 to Hussein’s relatives in Sulaimaniya. The money was to guarantee him a place in a car rather than a chicken van. “Please,” said Mohammed to Hussein’s family as he delivered the money that night. “Make sure Saeed goes to Germany in a taxi, not in a truck.”

No one knows quite why Saeed ended up in the back of a truck, not even Qamishi. The smuggler was the last person to speak to Saeed by phone – at 3am on 25 August, shortly before he boarded the van. “I told Saeed and the others: do not get into any vehicle apart from a taxi,” Qamishi said. “Saeed was ill, so there was no way I would send him in the back of a lorry. His brother had also told Saeed that he should not travel in the back of a lorry. Why he got into that lorry, I don’t know.”

The man who might have an answer is Hussein. But when Mohammed called him late on 25 August, wondering where his brother was, Hussein claimed he had been arrested in either Austria or Munich. Then he switched his phones off and has not been heard from since.

Two days later, a truck was found by the side of the road in Parndorf. The door was reportedly ajar, putrid liquid seeping from the back. The surrounding air, one journalist said, was thick with the “smell of death”. Police initially thought there were 20 bodies in the back. Then 50. Finally they realised there were 71 suffocated people inside – 59 men, eight women and four children, including a baby girl. Many are believed to have come from Syria. They had been stuck inside for at least 48 hours.

The suspected driver, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, was arrested in Bulgaria soon after the truck was found. He has been charged with negligent manslaughter and belonging to a criminal group, and faces extradition to Austria. His lawyer claims he is innocent. Five men, four Bulgarians and an Afghan have also been detained in Hungary over the case.

For a fortnight, Saeed’s family had no idea whether he was among the dead. In his last utterances, Hussein had claimed Saeed was in police custody. He had, after all, paid for a taxi.

But slowly, the increasing drip of information made the truth unavoidable. First came the news that Shwana, Saeed’s friend, was among the dead. Then an interpreter in Austria told a relative in the UK that Saeed was also in the van. Finally, the receipt of Saeed’s death certificate, three weeks after his death, turned the rumours into fact.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Saeed Othman Mohammed’s funeral in Sulaimaniya. The family kept his death secret from his mother and sister for as long as possible.

Ahmad called the male members from the families of all four friends to his driving school, telling them he had some news. The second of Saeed’s three brothers, Mohammed, arrived late to find a crowd had assembled and had begun to guess at the truth. Then Ahmad hugged his two siblings. “We had a brother who left Kurdistan voluntarily,” he said as everyone began to cry, “and now Allah has taken him from us.”

The news was kept secret from Saeed’s mother and sister for as long as possible. But when they all arrived at the airport to collect his body, it was impossible to conceal his death any longer. “Who has come to collect the corpse?” shouted an airport official. And then his mother began to scream.