LONDON — Twelve men were found alive in the refrigerated trailer of a truck in Belgium, the federal police said on Wednesday, in an echo of a similar, but deadly, case a week earlier.

The discovery of the men — 11 from Syria and one from Sudan — in the province of Antwerp came as the authorities were still scrambling to identify the bodies of 39 people found Oct. 23 in a refrigerated container in Grays, in southeastern England, which had arrived from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge.

Jana Verdegem, a spokeswoman for the Belgian Federal Police, said the 12 men were found overnight Tuesday into Wednesday morning after the truck driver, who thought he had been transporting only fruit and vegetables, alerted the police when he became suspicious of the load he was carrying, she said.

“He suspected that people were in the back of his truck,” she said. When the federal police arrived and opened the back of the vehicle, parked in a lot on the side of a highway in Oud-Turnhout in Antwerp, they found the men.