Up to 50 migrants have been found dead inside a lorry parked on an Austrian motorway near the Hungarian border, police said today.
The lorry, which contained between 20 and 50 bodies, some decomposing, was left with its back door open in the state of Burgenland.
“Human traffickers are criminals,” the interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, said after the lorry was found. “Anyone still thinking that they’re kind helpers cannot be helped.”
The gruesome find follows the discovery yesterday of 52 bodies of migrants packed into the hold of a fishing boat crossing the Mediterranean, where they probably died of suffocation after breathing engine fumes.
Migrants who pay less for passage are often packed into holds normally used for fish which can be no bigger than three feet high. Anyone trying to escape through the hatch during the voyage is beaten back by traffickers.
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Another 49 migrants were found dead in the hold of a boat from Libya on August 15, with suffocation also cited as the cause of death.
Giovanna Di Benedetto, an aid worker with Save the Children, said she had spoken yesterday to a group of Egyptian minors picked up at sea who said they had been crammed into the hold of a boat and told they would have to pay extra money to traffickers to come on deck to breathe.