Austria ups truck death toll to 71
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AUSTRIAN police yesterday raised the number of migrants found dead and decomposing in an abandoned truck on a motorway to 71.
Meanwhile, Libyan rescue workers recovered more than 100 bodies from yet another capsized boat crammed with desperate people trying to make it to Europe.
In a particularly horrifying tragedy in Europe’s unrelenting migrant crisis, Austrian authorities said the bodies found in the truck were likely Syrians and included a toddler and three young boys.
“Among these 71 people, there were 59 men, eight women and four children including a young girl 1 or 2 years old and three boys aged 8, 9 or 10,” police spokesman Hans Peter Doskozil told a packed news conference in Eisenstadt.
Hungarian police said they had arrested three Bulgarians — the owner of the Hungarian-plated vehicle and two drivers, according to Austrian police — and an Afghan and had raided several addresses and confiscated items.
Doskozil said Syrian travel documents were found in the 7.5-ton refrigerated truck found on Thursday near the Hungarian and Slovakian borders, suggesting the people were “likely” Syrians.
Austrian motorway maintenance workers alerted police after noticing “decomposing body fluids” dripping from the vehicle, Doskozil said.
Police were confronted by an overpowering stench and a mass of tangled limbs in the truck and forensics experts worked all night to clear out the vehicle.
The state of the corpses suggested that those inside had been dead for some time. Television images showed flies buzzing around the back of the vehicle in the baking sun.
Doskozil said the time and cause of death still had to be determined but there was a “certain probability” they had suffocated.
A reporter said the first 10 coffins arrived for autopsies in Vienna shortly after midday.
Austrian newspaper Kurier carried a black front page with the headline: “Who will stop this madness?”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in Austria for a summit with Balkan leaders on Europe’s migrant crisis on Thursday, said all those present were “shaken” by the “horrible” news.
“This is a warning to us to tackle this migrants issue quickly and in a European spirit, which means in a spirit of solidarity, and to find solutions,” she said.
European Union leaders have struggled to get to grips with a crisis that has seen nearly 340,000 migrants cross the bloc’s borders this year and many have come from hotspots like Iraq and Syria.
Millions of others have sought refuge in places like Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.
Merkel said yesterday that EU leaders could hold a special summit on the migrants crisis, but that such a gathering “must be able to take certain decisions.”
“If the stink from our car parks gets stronger perhaps we will finally understand, not just in Austria ... that it is time to create safe routes to Europe, fast registration and a swift and a fair sharing out (of migrants),” said Amnesty International’s Austrian chief Heinz Patzelt. The United Nations said yesterday that the number of refugees and migrants risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean to Europe has soared past 300,000 so far this year. More than 2,500 have drowned trying to reach EU nations after rickety overcrowded boats operated by people smugglers capsized.
The events in Austria have brought home that even when migrants make it across the Mediterranean, their troubles are far from over.
Since the lorry had Hungarian plates, the victims were highly likely among the more than 100,000 people to have trekked up through the western Balkans into EU member Hungary this year.
From Hungary, which is laying a barbed-wire barrier along its border with Serbia, many migrants try to make it — via Austria — to richer nations like Germany and Sweden.
“We passed by sea, and the sea was just a game playing with our lives,” said Lashkari, a 30-year-old Afghan picked up by Hungarian border police on Thursday night after traveling for 30 days.
“I dont think we’ve reached our final destination yet,” he said.
Meanwhile, officials in Libya said they had recovered 105 bodies that washed ashore after a boat packed with migrants sank in the Mediterranean, adding that 100 others are missing, feared dead. The vessel sank on Thursday after leaving Zuwara, a launchpad for smugglers shipping migrants to Italy.
Lacking navy ships, Libyan officials were searching for survivors with fishing boats and inflatables provided by locals. About 198 people had been rescued by noon, officials said.
“The boat was in a bad condition and people died with us,” said Ayman Talaal, a Syrian survivor, standing next to his daughter. “We have been forced into this route. It’s now called the grave of the Mediterranean Sea.”
Officials and residents put bodies into red bags on a beach littered with shoes, trousers and other personal items from drowned migrants.
“We, the Red Crescent, work with nothing. Some fishermen help us with a boat,” said Ibrahim al-Attoushi, an official at the Red Crescent in Zuwara.
“We only have one ambulance car.”
Libya has turned into a major transit route for migrants. Smuggling networks exploit the country’s chaos to bring Syrians into Libya via Egypt or nationals of sub-Saharan countries via Niger, Sudan and Chad.
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