Austrian police found the decomposing bodies of more than 70 migrants yesterday in a lorry abandoned on a motorway near the Hungarian border.
The grim discovery was made as Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, met Balkan leaders in Vienna to discuss how to cope with the thousands of migrants pouring into the region each day.
Police in the Burgenland region stopped to check the lorry, thinking it had broken down, but found no driver on board. They then noticed the smell of decomposing bodies, and signs that blood had been dripping from the back door, which was open.
Officials said later that the lorry had been parked at the spot since Wednesday, and that the migrants appeared to have been dead for days. No identities were released and no explanation for their deaths was given.
Mrs Merkel said she was “very much shaken by the appalling news” and added: “This is a warning to us that we must quickly tackle the issue of immigration, in a European spirit, in a spirit of solidarity, and find solutions.”
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Johanna Mikl-Leitner, the Austrian interior minister, said: “Human traffickers are criminals. Anyone still thinking that they’re kind helpers cannot be helped.”
The lorry was previously owned by a Slovakian chicken company and still bears its logo, although it has a Hungarian licence plate. Officials in Budapest said it was registered to a Romanian citizen in Kecskemét, central Hungary.
Austrian police said it would take at least until today before details about the victims’ identities or cause of death could be revealed.
Mrs Merkel announced after the Vienna meeting that Germany would join France, Italy and Greece to push through compulsory quotas at EU talks next month, dictating the number of migrants that countries must take.
More than 267,000 have arrived in Europe by boat so far this year, with more than 2,300 dying in the attempt. “We are going to demand fair quotas,” she said. “Then we will see who rejects those. There will be tough discussions.”
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Britain is not legally required to take part in the quota plan, but the government will be concerned over German calls to scrap the Dublin Convention rules on asylum claims, under which refugees must stay in the country where they entered Europe. It has allowed Britain to return almost 13,000 asylum seekers to other EU countries.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, said yesterday: “We must reform the Dublin Convention immediately, and find a way of creating binding and objective refugee quotas which take into account the ability of all member states to bear them.” The discovery of the bodies in Austria came a day after 52 migrants were found dead in the hold of a fishing boat crossing the Mediterranean, who either suffocated or were killed by engine fumes.
Migrants who pay less for passage from Libya are often packed into holds normally used for fish, which can be no bigger than 3ft high.
People trying to escape through the hatch during the voyage are beaten back by traffickers or forced to hand over more money.
Migrants travelling on the decks of traffickers’ boats have described passengers in the hold as being possessed by the devil — a likely reference to the convulsions that suffocation victims undergo before they die.
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The Italian government is considering using old prisons and properties seized from the mafia to house 93,000 migrants currently crammed into temporary accommodation, said an official, who added: “We would need to spend money to get the old jails ready and it would be done with full respect for human rights.”