71 migrants found dead in lorry: Four suspects in Hungary court

Four suspects have appeared in court in Hungary in connection with the deaths of 71 migrants whose bodies were found in a lorry in Austria.

The three Bulgarians and an Afghan were arrested in Hungary. Austria is expected to seek their extradition.

The victims – 59 men, eight women and four children – were found in the abandoned vehicle on Thursday.

They are thought to be mainly Syrians. Officials said they had probably died of suffocation two days earlier.

The lorry was found on the side of a main road near the Hungarian border.

Police were alerted when a road worker saw liquid seeping from the vehicle and the badly decomposing bodies were found in its refrigerated compartment.

Police suspect the vehicle found its way there as part of a Bulgarian-Hungarian human smuggling network.

The handcuffed suspects were brought to the courthouse in the central Hungarian city of Kecskemet in a convoy of black police vehicles.

They face charges of aggravated human smuggling. Hungarian law allows suspects to be held for 72 hours before they are either charged or released.

But the prosecutor has asked for that period to be prolonged because of the seriousness of this case, the BBC’s Nick Thorpe reports from the court.

The truck had Hungarian number plates and had travelled from Kecskemet.

So far this month more than 40,000 asylum seekers, the majority of them Syrian, have arrived in Hungary from the Balkans.

Many fall prey to smugglers who wait near the refugee camps, offering to take them at a high price on to western Europe, our correspondent says.

‘Crisis of solidarity’

The gruesome lorry discovery and other tragedies prompted UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to call on Friday for more concerted action to alleviate Europe’s migrant crisis.

Mr Ban called for a “collective political response” to avert “a crisis of solidarity”.

He called on states involved to “expand safe and legal channels of migration”.

On the same day the lorry was found, it emerged that some 200 migrants were feared dead after two boats sank off Libya. BBC