Three people arrested over the deaths of 39 people in the back of a truck near London have been released on bail as police continue to try to establish the identities of the victims through the DNA of relatives.
Police in Vietnam took hair and blood samples from fearful relatives as efforts focused on some of the country’s poorest provinces. Vietnam supplies some of the highest numbers of trafficked workers to the UK with reported cases of children working in illicit drugs cultivation and nail bars.
Nguyen Dinh Gia said he feared there was very little chance he would ever again see his 20-year-old son, Nguyen Dinh Luong, who had been trying to get to Britain after first making it to France.
"Police from the Ministry of Public Security came to get DNA samples, our hair and blood," he told Reuters at Can Loc in Ha Tinh province, where sympathisers gathered at the simple house amid lush rice fields to console the family.
"I advised him not to go because I told him that even though our family had always had nothing and our children were always in hardship, but we brought them up just fine," Nguyen said.
The driver of the truck, Maurice Robinson, 25, from Craigavon in Northern Ireland, has been charged with 39 counts of manslaughter and other trafficking-related offences and is due to appear in court on Monday.
The three people released on Sunday, two men and a woman, will have to report back to police next month. Irish police said another man was arrested on Saturday.
Investigators are also trying to establish if the lorry was part of a larger convoy carrying around 100 people.
The bodies were found on Wednesday at Grays, about 20 miles east of London. Police said that the victims all appeared to have had bags and officers collected mobile phones and other material to try to identify them.
Police had said initially that the victims were believed to be Chinese but the alert was raised by rights workers that many were from Vietnam. Vietnam’s VNExpress said that 24 families had reported missing relatives.
One family received a farewell message from their daughter, Pham Tra My, 26, via text. “I am really, really sorry, Mum and Dad, my trip to a foreign land has failed,” she wrote. “I am dying, I can’t breathe.”
