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by Our Foreign Desk
FOUR suspected people traffickers have been arrested in Hungary after 71 refugees were found dead in an abandoned lorry in Austria.
Austrian police said that two of the three arrested are Bulgarian citizens, while the third has Hungarian identity papers.
One is the lorry’s owner, a Bulgarian of Lebanese descent, while two others were apparently taking it in turns to drive, said police chief Hans Peter Doskozil, who is responsible for Burgenland province where the lorry was found.
He said police believe the suspects were part of a larger Bulgarian-Hungarian human smuggling ring.
The number of dead was initially estimated at 20, but the true extent of the crime was only realised yesterday.
The badly decomposed remains were found in the back of a refrigerator lorry abandoned on the hard shoulder of the main road between Budapest and Vienna on Wednesday night.
The 71 included eight women and four children — a girl between one and two years old and three boys aged eight to 10.
Autopsies are being carried out to determine the cause of death, but officials believe they may have suffocated in the sealed compartment.
Investigators found a travel document from Syria, indicating that at least some of the dead were refugees fleeing the civil war in that country.
Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said the tragedy “should serve as a wake-up call for joint European action” on the refugee crisis.
“We believe this underscores the ruthlessness of people smugglers who have expanded their business from the Mediterranean Sea to the highways of Europe. It shows they have absolutely no regard for human life and that they are only after profit,” she said.
In Libya, authorities collected the bodies of refugees who had drowned off the western coastal city of Zuwara. Some 200 are feared dead in the latest disaster involving desperate people trying to reach Europe across the Mediterranean.
And in Germany, a petrol bomb was thrown through a window at an asylum-seekers’ hostel in the north-western town of Salzhemmendorf overnight, starting a small fire but injuring none of the residents.
