Lorry victims were trapped before reaching Belgian coast, officials say

The 39 people who were found dead in a refrigerated lorry trailer in Essex on Wednesday were already trapped when they arrived at the Belgian coast en route to England, local officials have said, as police confirmed that the victims were all Chinese nationals. The Belgian officials said the migrants would have been locked in the container at temperatures as low as -25C for at least 10 hours after the trailer arrived at the port of Zeebrugge on Tuesday afternoon. As the investigation gathered pace, police secured an additional 24 hours to question a lorry driver arrested at the scene of the discovery, and inquiries broadened to involve the authorities in Ireland, Belgium and China. Probe expands in truck deaths, and all 39 victims are from China (AP) The chief executive of Zeebrugge port, Joachim Coens, said the trailer would not have been interfered with after it arrived there at 2.49pm. The driver is checked by cameras.” The mayor of Bruges, Dirk de Fauw, echoed this message in an interview on VRT, saying trailers were filmed until their arrival on the ferry. Experts said the majority of Chinese people brought to the UK illegally found themselves in a situation of debt bondage when they reached the country. The refrigerated trailer compartment arrived unaccompanied in the UK from Zeebrugge early on Wednesday morning and was collected at the port of Purfleet at 1.05am by a lorry cab driven by Robinson, a self-employed haulier from Northern Ireland. It said in a statement: “The directors of Global Trailer Rentals Limited wish to express their deepest sympathies with the family and friends of the people who have so tragically lost their lives. On its website, GTR says all its trailers are fitted with GPS monitoring and it uses a company called Blue Tree Systems to track the vehicles’ movements. While British police officers continued to conduct fingertip searches of the Waterglade industrial estate in Thurrock where the bodies were discovered, the Belgian federal prosecutor announced he had opened an inquiry into the deaths, to focus on all parties involved in the transport. So we have a lot of questions that we are hoping to find [answers to].” A senior British ports source told the Guardian that all cargo compartments coming into the UK underwent anti-terrorist screening, but this did not necessarily include measures to detect whether humans were inside a cargo – technology that is widely available at points of departure on the European mainland.