KECSKEMET, HUNGARY // Four defendants appeared in court in Hungary on Saturday over the deaths of 71 refugees whose bodies were found in a lorry by the side of an Austrian motorway.
The three Bulgarians and one Afghan – who police believe to be low-ranking members of a human trafficking gang – face prison terms ranging from two to 16 years each.
The abandoned lorry, which was found on Thursday in the baking sun near the Hungary border, contained the tightly packed, decomposing bodies of 59 men, eight women and four children including a little girl. They were thought to be Syrians.
Also on Saturday, a Libyan security official said that three people had been arrested on suspicion of involvement in launching a boat packed with refugees that sank off the country’s Mediterranean coast on Thursday, killing as many as 200 people.
“[Those arrested] are in their twenties,” he said. “We think that more are involved which we are still chasing.”
Arrests of smugglers are rare in Libya, where the judiciary has little power and two rival governments and various militias are vying for control of territory.
Meanwhile, Libyan coastguard raised the official death toll from the shipwreck to 111 on Saturday but said that “dozens” were still missing. Among the 400 sub-Saharan, Syrian and Asian refugees who were on board, 198 have been rescued.
“My little sister, someone climbed on her back and pushed her down. When I saw her for the last time, she was underwater with him on top of her,” said Shefaz Hamza, a 17-year-old from Pakistan who survived the shipwreck but also lost his mother in the tragedy.
The United Nations estimates that 300,000 people have fled conflict and hardship in the Middle East and Africa for a better life in Europe this year, while 2,500 more have died in the attempt – mostly in the Mediterranean.
In Hungary, the four suspected traffickers – who are alleged to be the lorry’s owner and drivers – arrived on Saturday afternoon at the court in Kecskemet, the city where the lorry began its journey.
Prosecutors called for the four men to be remanded in custody for a month due to the “exceptional nature of the crime, the subsequent deaths of the smuggled persons and the perpetration of the criminal act of people-smuggling in a businesslike manner”.
Prosecution spokesman Gabor Schmidt said that the suspects faced human trafficking charges involving torture and targeting financial gain.
The men are not being charged with manslaughter in Hungary because they will face that charge in Austria, he said.
The four suspects – two of them appearing to be in their 30s and the others around 50 – were led inside to the courthouse in handcuffs.
Austrian newspaper Oesterreich calculated on Saturday that the 71 people were crammed into 15 square metres and would have asphyxiated in 63 minutes once they were shut inside the refrigerated lorry with no air – the children suffocating first.
* Agence France-Presse with additional reporting by Reuters