Between 20 and 50 bodies were found partly decomposing inside a truck on a highway in Austria, authorities stated this week. The bodies, believed to be individuals being smuggled across the shared border with Hungary, were found in an abandoned truck on the A4 highway that runs east of Vienna, various media reports stated.
Police found the truck on Thursday, though it may have been abandoned on Wednesday. Many of the individuals likely suffocated when the driver turned off the vehicle. Authorities also found liquid decomposition dripping from the back of the refrigerated truck on Thursday, according to a translated version of The Krone Newspaper, an Austrian publication.
Just drove past truck on A4 in Austria with 50 dead refugees inside. Terrible smell of death as we passed. pic.twitter.com/a2AiDnsy5V
— Lindsey Hilsum (@lindseyhilsum) August 27, 2015
“Today is a dark day,” the Austria’s interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said during a press conference. She vowed that Austria would take up a zero-tolerance policy toward mafia gangs responsible for the incident.
The grisly find comes as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Balkan heads of government are meeting in Vienna Thursday to talk about the migration crisis.
“We are of course all shaken by the appalling news,” Merkel said at a news conference. “This reminds us that we must tackle quickly the issue of immigration and in a European spirit — that means in a spirit of solidarity — and to find solutions.”
Individuals made 28,300 asylum requests in Austria between January and June 2015, surpassing the number of requests made in all of 2014. Austrian officials expect that the number of asylum requests to reach 80,000 this year.
Across the border, at least 145,000 individuals have already been detained by Hungarian police so far this year, three times as many as in all of 2014, the Associated Press reported. About 40,000 individuals indicated that they’re from Syria. But others walk into Hungary from Serbia where they are then registered, fingerprinted, and sent to overcrowded refugee centers. From there, many try to enter Germany, the Netherlands, and other European countries, the publication indicated.
As authorities crack down on smugglers and human traffickers, an increasing number of migrants are seeking out more dangerous routes into Europe from conflict-ridden countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Just last month, thousands of individuals believed to be from West Africa tried to cross the Channel Tunnel between France and the United Kingdom. Many were injured when French authorities intervened.
Unscrupulous human smugglers have long disregarded the safety of individuals seeking better lives. In an eerily similar parallel, 18 people packed into the locked trailer of an 18-wheeler were found dead by Texas sheriff deputies in 2003. The truck was “airless” with some “who tried to claw two holes through the foam insulation to admit fresh air,” the San Francisco Gate reported at the time.
Update:
As of Friday, Austrian officials believe that there were at least 71 victims, including eight women and three children between the ages of two and eight.