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Chinese embassy staff head to Essex after bodies of 39 Chinese nationals found in UK truck
The bodies were found early on Wednesday at an industrial estate in southeast England
The 25-year-old driver of the truck has been arrested on suspicion of murder
Agencies
Published: 5:49pm, 24 Oct, 2019
The discovery triggered shock and outrage in Britain. Photo: Reuters
Chinese embassy staff are heading to Essex in Britain to verify that
39 people found dead in a truck were its nationals, the foreign ministry said on Thursday.
This came after the foreign ministry seemed to confirm that the victims were Chinese, according to a tweet from China’s Global Times. The paper, published by the official People’s Daily newspaper, said the foreign ministry told the newspaper “nothing could be released as of now” and the Chinese embassy in the
UK would release a statement after it had investigated the case.
The victims were discovered in a container on the back of a truck in Grays, east of London, on Wednesday, shortly after arriving by ferry from Belgium. The local Essex police force, which is working with immigration officials, said their initial priority was to try to identify the 39 victims.
British media cited unidentified sources as saying on Thursday that the victims, thought to be 38 adults and one teenager, were Chinese nationals. British police separately confirmed this.
“The staff of the Chinese embassy in the UK is driving to the scene to verify this situation,” the Chinese foreign ministry said on its Weibo social media account.
“We read with heavy heart the reports about the death of 39 people in Essex, England,” said an unverified Twitter account regularly attributed to China’s UK ambassador, Liu Xiaoming. “We are in close contact with the British police to seek clarification and confirmation of the relevant reports,” it said.
The 25-year-old driver of the truck, who was from Northern Ireland, has been arrested on suspicion of murder.
It is the worst incident of its kind in the UK since the bodies of 58 Chinese people were found in a container in Dover, Kent, in 2000.
Police have searched two addresses in Northern Ireland in relation to the discovery the bodies.
Alongside the murder inquiry, a parallel investigation has begun to examine whether organised crime networks – widely believed to be behind a recent surge in people-smuggling operations seeking to bring migrants to the UK – played a role.
In the latest incident, the container arrived at Purfleet docks in Essex, southern England, having also travelled from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge.
Police forensic experts at the scene Wednesday. Photo: AP
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The red cab unit was believed to have come from Ireland. It had “Ireland” emblazoned on the windscreen along with the message “The Ultimate Dream”.
The grim discovery of the bodies was made at 1:40am Wednesday, just over an hour after the container arrived in Britain.
Media reports suggested the refrigeration unit may have been on and the migrants could have frozen to death in temperatures as low as -25 degrees Celsius.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson described it as “unimaginable tragedy”.
“It is hard to put ourselves in the shoes of those emergency services … as they were asked to open that container and to expose the appalling crime that had taken place,” Johnson said.
The vehicle has been moved to a secure site at nearby Tilbury Docks where the bodies can be recovered and further forensic work undertaken to begin what police said would be the lengthy process of identifying the victims.
Thousands of migrants are smuggled into Britain annually on trucks, ships and sometimes planes, with cases reported almost daily.
The Essex case is reminiscent of the 71 migrants who were found suffocated in an abandoned truck on an Austrian motorway in August 2015, at the height of Europe’s refugee crisis.
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