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SOFIA, Bulgaria — The police in Bulgaria on Friday found an deserted truck containing the our bodies of 18 migrants, who appeared to have suffocated inside a secret compartment below a load of lumber.
The Inside Ministry mentioned that, in line with preliminary info, the truck was carrying about 40 migrants. The survivors had been taken to close by hospitals for emergency therapy.
The nation’s well being minister, Assen Medjidiev, mentioned a lot of the survivors had been in very dangerous situation.
“They’ve suffered from lack of oxygen; their garments are moist; they’re freezing and, clearly, haven’t eaten for days,” Mr. Medzhidiev mentioned.
The truck was discovered alongside a freeway close to the capital, Sofia. The driving force was absent, however the police found the passengers in a compartment beneath the lumber the car additionally was carrying.
The authorities didn’t instantly reveal the nationalities of the migrants. Bulgarian information media reported they had been all from Afghanistan.
Bulgaria, a Balkan nation of seven million, is on a serious route for migrants from the Center East and Afghanistan to Europe. Solely a small variety of them plan to remain within the nation, which is the European Union’s poorest member. As a substitute, they use Bulgaria as a transit hall on their approach west.
To forestall individuals from coming into the nation illegally, Bulgaria’s authorities erected a barbed-wire fence alongside its 161-mile border with Turkey. However foreigners fleeing poverty or battle of their residence international locations handle to enter with the assistance of native smugglers.
Whereas the deaths of Europe-bound refugees and asylum seekers at sea are extra frequent, the grim discovery in Bulgaria just isn’t the primary time teams of migrants have been discovered useless in deserted automobiles.
In October 2019, the British police found the bodies of 39 people in a refrigerated container that had been hauled to England. The police mentioned that every one the victims, who ranged in age from 15 to 44, had come from impoverished villages in Vietnam and had been believed to have paid smugglers to take them on a dangerous journey to higher lives overseas.
The police mentioned that they had died of a mixture of a scarcity of oxygen and overheating in an enclosed area. The truck found within the city of Grays, east of London, had arrived in England on a ferry from Zeebrugge in Belgium.
One other related tragedy happened in August 2015, when 71 migrants suffocated at the back of a refrigerated truck discovered on a freeway in Austria.
A court docket in Hungary convicted an Afghan man and three Bulgarian accomplices in 2018 of being a part of a felony group and committing a number of crimes, together with human smuggling and homicide, in reference to the deaths.
Ten different defendants, principally Bulgarians, got jail phrases starting from three to 12 years.
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