By Karla Adam and Rick Noack
LONDON — British police launched one of the country’s biggest ever murder investigations on Wednesday after 39 bodies were found inside a tractor-trailer on an industrial estate in southeast England.
Essex Police said the driver, a 25-year-old man from Northern Ireland, had been arrested on suspicion of murder.
The bodies — 38 adults and one teenager — were found at Waterglade Industrial Park in the Essex town of Grays, about 25 miles east of central London. Police have not yet offered an account of what might have happened, but the scene bore the markings of human trafficking.
The truck was registered in Varna, Bulgaria — a port city on the Black Sea coast — to a company owned by an Irish woman, according to a statement by the Bulgarian foreign ministry.
Essex Deputy Chief Constable Pippa Mills said police had not yet identified the victims or where they are from, adding it could be a “lengthy process.”
Because citizens of Bulgaria, another European Union member state, can travel freely to Britain, the occupants of the truck may have been from elsewhere.
Essex Police said they believed the truck travelled from Zeebrugge, a Belgian port, to Purfleet, a small town in Essex on the River Thames, docking shortly after 12.30 a.m. That account is an update from an earlier police report that the truck entered the United Kingdom on Saturday via Holyhead in North Wales.
At around 1:05 a.m. on Wednesday, the truck left Purfleet, police said. Thirty-five minutes later, police received a call from local ambulance services saying they discovered the container. It was unclear how the ambulance services had been tipped off.
“We have arrested the lorry driver in connection with the incident who remains in police custody as our enquiries continue,” Essex Chief Superintendent Andrew Mariner said in the statement. “This is a tragic incident where a large number of people have lost their lives. Our enquiries are ongoing to establish what has happened.”
Police have not released the driver’s name, though several British media outlets identified him, citing local sources, and posted photos from what are said to be his social media accounts.
The tractor part of the unit, police said, is thought to have originated in Northern Ireland.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was “appalled by this tragic incident in Essex.”
“I am receiving regular updates and the Home Office will work closely with Essex Police as we establish exactly what has happened. My thoughts are with all those who lost their lives & their loved ones,” he tweeted.
Jackie Doyle-Price, a Conservative lawmaker, told Parliament on Wednesday: “Sadly, this is not the first time that we have found people in metal containers in my constituency. We’re really sorry to say it’s all too regular an occurrence and it was only a matter of time before that would end in tragedy.”
“This is now a multinational problem that we need to fix,” she added.
British authorities say human trafficking and modern-day slavery are on the rise. The National Crime Agency figures show that last year 6,993 potential victims were referred to the government’s program that aims to identify and support victims — a 36 percent increase from 2017. The agency states, “potential victims of human trafficking were reported from 130 different nationalities in 2018 [and] Albanian and Vietnamese nationals were the most commonly reported.” The victims are used as forced labor, in the sex industry and other work.
Most fatal incidents in which victims died inside containers in recent years have involved migrants, however.
In June 2000, the bodies of 58 Chinese immigrants were found in the back of a truck container in English port city of Dover. The following year, a Dutch driver was sentenced to 14 years in jail for manslaughter. The immigrants, who paid a smuggling gang $26,000, suffocated to death after the driver closed the air vent on the truck during a five-hour ferry ride across the English Channel.
In August 2015, 71 bodies were found on a highway in Austria, inside a hermetically sealed and locked freezer truck. Most victims were from Syria, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. The discovery came at the peak of Europe’s refugee influx and became one of its defining, tragic moments.
Research by German public television and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper later revealed that Hungarian officials had tapped the traffickers’ phones, but failed to intervene on time.
After the 2015 incident, the E.U. Law Enforcement Agency (Europol) added a dedicated European Migrant Smuggling Center. In a report published this year, the center found that the most common method of smuggling involves concealing people in cars, vans or trucks.
Rod McKenzie, managing director of policy and public affairs at the Road Haulage Association, said that the journey for the people in the truck from Bulgaria would have been “hellish.” He said that it was clear from pictures that the truck had a refrigerated unit, where temperatures can go as low as -13 Fahrenheit.
“It would be completely dark, probably completely airless, no sanitary facilities, possibly freezing temperatures, with the likelihood of death from freezing or suffocation enormous,” McKenzie said.
He surmized that those who sent the trailer to Essex may have chosen the route they did in an effort to avoid the strict checks at the popular crossing between Calais, France, and Dover, England. He said authorities there use sniffer dogs and monitors that can detect heartbeats, heat and CO2 levels, among other things.
“Purfleet, however, doesn’t have that level of technology to screen lorries,” he said.
- Noack reported from Berlin. William Booth in London contributed to this report.
- Culled from Washington Post