The 39 Chinese nationals found dead in a refrigerated truck in eastern England were trapped for at least 10 hours in a container with the temperature set to as low as -25 degrees Celsius (-13 degrees Fahrenheit), according to Belgian authorities.
The trailer arrived at Zeebrugge port in Belgium at 2.49pm en route to Britain and would not have been interfered with after, The Guardian reported, citing the port’s chief executive Joachim Coens.
“A refrigerated container in the port zone is completely sealed. During the check, the seal is examined, as is the licence plate. The driver is checked by cameras,” Coens told Belgian media.
Noting that the vehicles remained on camera until they arrived on the ferry, Bruges mayor Dirk de Fauw told VRT: “[To] break the seal, bring 39 people on board and apply a new seal without being noticed, that chance is extremely small.”
British police confirmed on Thursday that all 39 victims were Chinese nationals, in the worst human smuggling tragedy in the United Kingdom in nearly two decades.
The Chinese embassy in Britain said in a statement: “We read with heavy heart the reports about the death of 39 people in Essex, England. We are in close contact with the British police to seek clarification and confirmation of the relevant reports.”
The British government said the investigation was focusing on human trafficking. Police in Northern Ireland have raided three properties and the National Crime Agency said it was working to identify “organised crime groups who may have played a part,” the BBC reported.
The 25-year-old truck driver, identified as Mo Robinson, remained in custody on suspicion of murder. Robinson reportedly drove his truck from Laurelvale, Co Armagh and took a ferry from Dublin to Holyhead in north Wales on Saturday.
The bodies of the 31 men and eight women were found inside the truck container in Grays, Essex, soon after arriving from Belgium.
“Each of the 39 people must undergo a full coroner’s process to establish a cause of death, before we move on to attempting to identify each individual within the trailer,” Essex police said.
Belgian authorities said on Thursday that the container found hitched to the truck driven by Robinson had arrived in Zeebrugge on Tuesday afternoon. The trailer was shipped to Purfleet port in Essex later that day and arrived at about midnight before it was allegedly picked up half an hour later by Robinson.
The vehicle then left the port about 35 minutes later, and was captured on CCTV arriving at the Waterglade Industrial Park in Thurrock at about 1.10am, where ambulance staff discovered the bodies around 20 minutes later.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson described the incident as an “unimaginable tragedy”.
“It is hard to put ourselves in the shoes of those emergency services … as they were asked to open that container and to expose the appalling crime that had taken place,” Johnson said.
Essex Police initially suggested the truck could be from Bulgaria. A spokesman from the Bulgarian foreign affairs ministry said the truck had been registered in the country in the name of a company owned by an Irish citizen. The chain of events casts doubt on the ability of the Belgian port to monitor human trafficking.
In 2017, the British government noted in a report that crime groups based in Belgium continued to favour hard-sided refrigerated lorries to transport migrants to the UK.
“Belgium has become a location of greater focus for the activities of organised people smugglers in the past year where smugglers of various nationalities operate,” it said.
Matt Friedman, head of the Mekong Club which works with businesses to tackle human trafficking problems, said most victims in such cases had dreamed of finding a better life outside China.
“The chains of events that allow for a person to be transported from China to Europe are well-established. Each year, thousands of Chinese people are tricked and deceived into spending thousands of yuan with the expectation of finding a better life in the West,” Friedman said.
“In reality, many of them are cheated and deceived. Without aggressive prevention campaigns throughout China, this will continue,” he said.
The case this week is the worst incident of its kind in Britain since the bodies of 58 Chinese people were found in a container in Dover, Kent, in 2000. There were two survivors. The Dutch truck driver was jailed for 14 years for manslaughter in Britain the following year, while the courts in the Netherlands jailed seven people for their role in the human smuggling operation.
One of China’s most influential journalists said it was important to ask why Chinese nationals were illegally migrating to Britain.
“Why are there at least three major mass deaths in the UK where the victims are Chinese?” Hu Xijin, chief editor of the Global Times, a subsidiary of Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily, said in a message to The Washington Post.
“China is not so poor that people can’t live here, nor is there war. There are many ways to go abroad legally. Chinese people should also be able to find ways to safeguard their rights abroad,” Hu added.
