Investigations of 39 people found dead in a truck

In the UK, Essex police continue to investigate the death of 39 people (38 adults and one teenager) found on Wednesday in a refrigerated truck trailer in the industrial area of ​​Grays, east of London. The truck driver, a 25-year-old Northern Irishman arrested yesterday, is still in custody on charges of manslaughter and the police searched two houses associated with him in two locations in Northern Ireland. The police also opened an investigation to determine whether people found dead were migrants trying to enter the UK illegally, as is likely, and whether their arrival in the country had been organized by a criminal network. It is thought that organized crime has recently been heavily involved in human trafficking to the United Kingdom.

A truck investigation was also opened in Belgium, the country from which the truck trailer had arrived in the United Kingdom, through the port of Zeebrugge. Eric Van Duyse, a spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor's office, said: "For the moment we don't know how long the trailer has been in Belgium, it could have been hours or days, we don't know." The truck driver did not come from Belgium, but from Northern Ireland, and so did the driver: it is thought to have hooked the trailer by attaching it to the tractor a few minutes before the arrival of the ambulances that found the bodies. It is not clear who alerted the ambulance service, who did not want to give details of the call received to the newspapers.

Belgium is not the only other country besides the United Kingdom to be involved in the investigation: originally the trailer was in Bulgaria, another member country of the European Union: it was registered in Varna, a city on the Black Sea, under the name of a company owned by a Northern Irish citizen. However, the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry said it was "very unlikely" that people found dead were Bulgarian: Bulgarian citizens, like others in the European Union, could enter the UK without problems.

It is not unusual for groups of migrants to be found inside containers and trailers in the UK. Just Wednesday, nine undocumented migrants were found, alive, in a truck along a highway in Kent. Many times in the past it happened that people involved in this type of illegal immigration were found dead: the most serious case dates back to 2000, when the bodies of 58 people of Chinese nationality were found in a container in Dover. There have also been similar cases outside the UK: in 2015 the bodies of 71 people were found in an abandoned truck along an Austrian highway.