Dead migrants found in abandoned truck near Austrian capital

[webfact]

Dead migrants found in abandoned truck near Austrian capital
By GEORGE JAHN

VIENNA (AP) — As regional leaders met Thursday to tackle Europe's refugee crisis, a gruesome discovery unfolded a short drive from the Austrian capital: An abandoned truck was found with at least 20 — and possibly up to 50 — decomposing bodies of migrants piled inside.

It was the latest tragedy in a year that has seen tens of thousands of people risking all to seek a better life or refuge in wealthy European countries. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the Vienna conference she was "shaken by the awful news," and summit participants held a minute of silence.

"This reminds us that we in Europe need to tackle the problem quickly and find solutions in the spirit of solidarity," Merkel said.

Migrants fearful of death at sea in overcrowded and flimsy boats as they flee turmoil and war in the Middle East have increasingly turned to using a land route to Europe through the Western Balkans. But the discovery of the bodies in the truck on the main highway connecting Vienna to the Hungarian capital of Budapest showed there is no truly safe path.

Thousands cross from Greece daily with the help of smugglers, aiming to reach European Union countries like Germany, Austria or Sweden and apply for asylum. The human traffickers may charge thousands of dollars per person, only to stuff them into trucks and vans so tightly that they often cannot move — or breathe.

Austrian police declined to say what killed those found in the truck, pending an investigation.

The state of decomposition made establishing identities and even the exact number of dead difficult. Senior police official Hans Peter Doskozil said that "20, 30, 40 — maybe 50" corpses were inside.

The truck was towed to an air-conditioned location near the border with Hungary where authorities would open it once temperatures had cooled enough to begin removing the bodies, said Doskozil, the chief of police in Burgenland province east of Vienna.

Autopsies would be conducted in the capital later, he said.

Officials found the driverless truck shortly before noon on the highway shoulder about 25 miles (40 kilometers) east of Vienna, near the town of Parndorf, and they originally believed it had mechanical trouble, said police spokesman Helmut Marban.

Then they saw blood dripping from the cargo area and noticed the smell of dead bodies, he said.

Police quickly realized there were no survivors, Doskozil said.

Information from Hungarian police indicated the truck was east of Budapest early Wednesday and entered Austria overnight before being abandoned, he told reporters in Eisenstadt, the provincial capital.

The condition of the bodies indicated the victims may have died before the truck entered Austria, he added.

The truck apparently used to belong to the Slovak company Hyza, which sells chicken meat and is part of Agrofert Holding, owned by Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babis. Agrofert Holding, in a statement, said it had sold the truck in 2014. The new owners did not remove Hyza's logos, and the company said it had nothing to do with the truck now.

News of the tragedy spread quickly to the thousands of migrants traveling on foot and by vehicle from Serbia into Hungary, a major entry point for EU asylum-seekers. They said they had heard stories before of smugglers lying to clients and dropping them far short of their promised destination or of abandoning them, sometimes still locked in trucks.

But they felt there often was little choice but to take such risks, given the physical toll of walking many miles on challenging — often guided only by a map on a smartphone.

Hassan El Ali, from the Syrian city of Aleppo, said smugglers can easily be contacted "face to face, but also through Facebook and Twitter." The 31-year-old who was camped on Serbia's border with Hungary said migrants used word of mouth to find "hidden pages and forums about how to cross the border between Hungary and Serbia."

Hungary on Thursday deployed more police on its porous border, but refugee activists said the effort appeared futile in a nation whose migrant camps are overloaded and barely delay their journeys into the heart of the EU.

Police reported a single-day record of 3,241 detentions Wednesday, 700 more than the previous day, as they launched a new initiative to channel migrants to one of the country's five camps using special trains. Under police escort, about 600 asylum- seekers boarded a train to be delivered directly to at least two migrant camps.

Others continued to cross Hungary's 109-mile (174-kilometer) border with Serbia on foot.

At the Vienna summit, Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann had just finished telling other European leaders that there was an urgent need to crack down on human traffickers when news came of the grisly discovery on the highway.

Participants fell silent for a minute in tribute, and Faymann invoked the tragedy as showing the need for quick solutions to deal with the torrent of migrants.

"Today, refugees lost the lives they had tried to save by escaping, but lost them in the hand of traffickers," Faymann said.

Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz floated elements of a five-point plan that foresees setting up safe havens in the migrants' home countries where those seeking asylum in the EU could be processed and — if they qualify — be given safe passage to Europe.

Beyond safe havens, possibly protected by troops acting under a U.N. mandate, the Austrian plan to be submitted to EU decision-makers foresees increased controls on Europe's outer borders and coordinated action against human smuggling. It also calls for refugee quotas for each of the EU's 28 members — something that many countries have opposed.

"Never before in history have so many people fled their homes to escape war, violence and persecution," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said. "And given the large number of unresolved conflicts in our neighborhood, the stream of refugees seeking protection in Europe will not abate in the foreseeable future."

Amnesty International alleged that EU indecisiveness was partly to blame for the latest migrant tragedy.

"People dying in their dozens — whether crammed into a truck or a ship — en route to seek safety or better lives is a tragic indictment of Europe's failures to provide alternative routes," the rights group said a statement. "Europe has to step up and provide protection to more, share responsibility better and show solidarity to other countries and to those most in need."

On Wednesday, the bodies of 51 migrants were found in the hull of a wooden boat off Libya by a Swedish rescue crew. The Swedish ship Poseidon was already rescuing 130 migrants from a raft when it got a call to assist the nearby wooden boat. The Swedes rescued 439 survivors from the boat and then found the bodies below deck.
___

David Rising and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin, Pablo Gorondi in Budapest, Hungary, Shawn Pogachnik in Roeszke, Hungary, Karel Janicek in Prague and Alison Mutler in Bucharest, Romania contributed.


-- (c) Associated Press 2015-08-28

[user82374298374]

>"Never before in history have so many people fled their homes to escape war, violence and persecution," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said.

I think Herr Steinmeier is in dire need of a history lesson - starting with the history of his own country in the 20th Century.

[emilymat]

I'm not trying to be clever or minimise my horror at this.

When I was at school we were taught that humans developed in the rift valley in Kenya (?) and spread out slowly into Europe etc.

It seems now we have a repeat of history but on a huge scale. There seems to me to be no solution, but to accept this is going to continue for years on end.

[webfact]

VIENNA (AP) - Austrian official: Death toll of migrants found in truck left on highway rises to more than 70.

[otherstuff1957]

Every idiot knows that a refrigerated truck is airtight.... except for the idiots who packed 70 people in this one & left them to suffocate!

(this article doesn't seem to mention it, but the BBC says that it is a refer truck)

[Mudcrab]

I'm not trying to be clever or minimise my horror at this.

When I was at school we were taught that humans developed in the rift valley in Kenya (?) and spread out slowly into Europe etc.

It seems now we have a repeat of history but on a huge scale. There seems to me to be no solution, but to accept this is going to continue for years on end.

Very much doubt that. The time is rapidly approaching when people in Europe will say "enough is enough" and demand action...or take matters in to their own hands.

[webfact]

Austrian official: Death toll of migrants in truck over 70

VIENNA (AP) — The number of migrants found dead in a truck abandoned on Austria's main highway to Hungary has risen to more than 70, the Interior Ministry said Friday.

The count reported Friday by Interior Ministry official Alexander Marakovits is significantly higher than the estimate of 20 to 50 that authorities gave Thursday after finding the refrigerated truck parked on the safety lane of the main highway connecting Vienna and Budapest, Hungary.

The newest figure comes from a body count late Thursday. The truck was towed then to a refrigerated warehouse near the border with Hungary to allow police and forensic experts to remove the victims, try to identify them and start on autopsies meant to determine how they died.

Police in eastern Burgenland province, where the tragedy occurred, were not releasing details of their investigation ahead of a news conference scheduled for late Friday morning.

But the Kronen Zeitung newspaper reported that three suspects believed to have been involved in smuggling the migrants had been arrested in Hungary.


-- (c) Associated Press 2015-08-28

[webfact]

VIENNA (AP) - Austrian police: Final death toll of migrants in truck is 71, including 4 children, 8 women.

[ddavidovsky]

The politicians are apparently still unable to distinguish between refugees and economic migrants. Refugees temporarily flee to a neighbouring country for safety - especially to a country whose language and customs they have in common. Refugees don't traipse across country after country trying to get to one with the best prospects. That's economic migration.

[pmugghc]

Seems the exodus from Libya includes people from Pakistan and Bangladesh. I'd assume these are economic migrants.

[thaibeachlovers]

I'm not trying to be clever or minimise my horror at this.

When I was at school we were taught that humans developed in the rift valley in Kenya (?) and spread out slowly into Europe etc.

It seems now we have a repeat of history but on a huge scale. There seems to me to be no solution, but to accept this is going to continue for years on end.

Very much doubt that. The time is rapidly approaching when people in Europe will say "enough is enough" and demand action...or take matters in to their own hands.

The next elections will be very interesting.

A few countries have already said they are not going to play this game anymore.

[Basil B]

4 arrests...

Hungarian police say they have arrested four people over the discovery of the bodies of 71 migrants, thought to be Syrian, in a lorry in Austria.

Three of those arrested are Bulgarian and one is Afghan.

The victims included 59 men, eight women and four children who are thought to have been dead for about two days.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34083337

[cookee68]

Stay where you are, the risk cant get any worse

[cookee68]

If it carries on this way, there will be lots of countries with no people in them

[GeorgesAbitbol]

Maybe if the Europe and US stopped bringing mayhem in africa and middle east they would have less migrants coming....

Strangely those group of countries are also the same who sell weapons for those wars....

So for less refugees it could be nice to stop spreading wars and feed the countries in africa and middle east with weapons to make wars by proxies for oil and natural ressources

[RickBradford]

This is what happens when you try to force your way into countries that don't want you, I'm afraid.

To pretend that all these people are fleeing terror is contradicted by their own stories, such as the group from Senegal which openly admitted that it travelled to Mali, then Niger, then to Libya, where they hopped on a boat to Europe.

Then there was the case of the female Ethiopian lawyer, heavily pregnant, who had the nerve to declare on air that the UK had an obligation to allow her in so her unborn child could have a better life.

I wonder where this inflated sense of entitlement comes from. Probably developed as a counterpoint to the EU's feeble "progressive" attitude.

[ddavidovsky]

Seems the exodus from Libya includes people from Pakistan and Bangladesh. I'd assume these are economic migrants.

All those on a journey across numerous countries are de facto economic migrants, regardless of what they are fleeing. Real refugees stop just across the border in a neighbouring country.

[h90]

I'm not trying to be clever or minimise my horror at this.

When I was at school we were taught that humans developed in the rift valley in Kenya (?) and spread out slowly into Europe etc.

It seems now we have a repeat of history but on a huge scale. There seems to me to be no solution, but to accept this is going to continue for years on end.

Very much doubt that. The time is rapidly approaching when people in Europe will say "enough is enough" and demand action...or take matters in to their own hands.

In Germany there are already huge problems......comes mostly from the soccer hooligans and it will increase...

[h90]

I'm not trying to be clever or minimise my horror at this.

When I was at school we were taught that humans developed in the rift valley in Kenya (?) and spread out slowly into Europe etc.

It seems now we have a repeat of history but on a huge scale. There seems to me to be no solution, but to accept this is going to continue for years on end.

Very much doubt that. The time is rapidly approaching when people in Europe will say "enough is enough" and demand action...or take matters in to their own hands.

The next elections will be very interesting.

A few countries have already said they are not going to play this game anymore.

Austria and France.....

In Austria are some elections in Upper Austria and Vienna. Nothing important but it will show if there is a major switch to the freedom party which oppose unregulated immigration.

France is the question how big the impact of the family problems of the Le Pens is.

[Grouse]

https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density

This gives some interesting figures on population density

Netherlands about 1000/mile2

UK about 660

USA about 85

Any volunteers?

How about Putin gives up Eastern Poland still held after being stolen in the Molotov - Ribbentrop pact

We could set up a new secular buffer state and fill it with grateful refugees!

You can cheer now if you like?