Essex lorry deaths


On 23 October 2019, the bodies of 39 Vietnamese, 29 men, 2 boys, and 8 women, were found in the trailer of an articulated refrigerator lorry in Grays, Essex, United Kingdom. The trailer had been shipped from the port of Zeebrugge, Belgium, to Purfleet, Essex, UK, and the lorry cab and its driver are believed to be originated from Northern Ireland. Investigations are being led by Essex Police, and involve the national authorities of the UK, Belgium, Ireland and Vietnam. Five men, including two lorry drivers who transported the trailer, were charged with manslaughter and other offences, and several other people have been arrested.

Lorry

The lorry cab, a Scania R-series, was registered in Bulgaria in 2017 in the name of a company owned by an Irish citizen, but had not returned there since, according to the Bulgarian foreign ministry. The refrigerated trailer was leased on 15 October from a rental company in County Monaghan. Refrigerated trailers can be kept airtight and frozen to preserve perishables, which could lead to an occupant dying of suffocation or hypothermia should they become trapped inside.
The lorry cab and the trailer arrived separately in Purfleet, Essex, from where they travelled together the short distance to Grays. Police believe that the cab was driven from Northern Ireland on 19 October. It then travelled through the Republic of Ireland to Dublin, and from there by sea to Holyhead in Wales, from where it was driven to Purfleet. The trailer was loaded onto the freight ferry Clementine in Zeebrugge in Belgium. GPS data showed it had previously travelled to Dunkirk and Lille in France and Bruges in Belgium. It arrived in Purfleet, a town with a port on the Thames, at around 00:30 on 23 October and was picked up with the cab there about half-an-hour later.
The Zeebrugge port chairman said it was "highly unlikely" the migrants entered the trailer there, and that breaking the seal, loading 39 people and resealing the trailer without being noticed would be "virtually impossible".

Incident

On 23 October 2019, shortly after 01:40 BST, staff of the East of England Ambulance Service found 39 bodies in a refrigerated articulated lorry. The lorry was in Eastern Avenue at the Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays, Essex. The ambulance service informed Essex Police, who arrived shortly after. The police did not say who called the ambulance service.
Shortly after the police arrived, Eastern Avenue was closed and not fully re-opened until 25 October. The lorry driver was a 25-year-old man from Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. He was arrested at the scene on suspicion of murder.

Fatalities

The ambulance service said that all 39 people were dead before it arrived, and attempts at resuscitation could not be made. The deceased—31 males and 8 females—included 10 teenagers; the 2 youngest were 15-year-old boys.
They are believed to have been either victims of human trafficking, migrants who paid smugglers to move them to the United Kingdom, or both. Smugglers often force migrants to work off the cost of the trip in slave-like conditions. There have been a number of incidents in which migrants to Europe died or were injured as a result of dangerous transportation methods. In an incident in Dover in June 2000, 58 Chinese nationals died in similar circumstances.
On 23 November, it was reported that one of the teenagers later found dead had gone missing from an asylum centre in the Netherlands.
On 11 February 2020, Essex Police said that post-mortems gave a combination of hypoxia and hyperthermia as the provisional causes of death.

Identification

Initially the police said the deceased were all Chinese nationals and the Chinese embassy in London sent officials to assist with identification.
On 2 November, police clarified they were all Vietnamese. The family of a 26-year-old Vietnamese woman made public her last text message to her parents which she sent as she was dying; her family said they paid around £30,000 to smuggle their daughter from Vietnam to the UK.
On 3 November, Vietnamese officials provided DNA samples from people in Nghệ An Province and essential documents to help identify the deceased. By 7 November, all of the deceased had been formally identified. Names, ages and hometowns were released on 8 November; 20 were from Nghệ An Province, 10 from Hà Tĩnh, 4 from Haiphong, 3 from Quảng Bình, 1 from Diễn Châu District and 1 from Thừa Thiên-Huế.

Investigation

A murder investigation was launched on the morning of the day of the discovery. The investigation was the "largest mass fatality victim identification" investigation in the history of Essex Police. The National Crime Agency suggested that organised crime might be involved.
The investigation is being led by Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Stoten, a Senior Investigating Officer within the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate.
The lorry and bodies were moved from the scene to a secure location in Tilbury Docks, another nearby port on the Thames, to continue the investigation. Police later moved the bodies to a mortuary at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford for post-mortems to be carried out.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar spoke in Dáil Éireann and said that Irish authorities would investigate any involvement regarding their country. In the evening of 23 October, the Belgian prosecutor's office announced that they would also investigate the lorry's transit through their country. The police suspect that an Irish people-smuggling ring which has been under investigation for around a year might be involved.
On 24 October, the Evening Standard speculated that the trailer had travelled from the Netherlands before its departure from Belgium. British police had also searched two properties in Northern Ireland. Belgian officials said the people were trapped in the trailer for at least 10 hours.

Arrests and charges

On 25 October, police arrested a man and a woman from Warrington, Cheshire, on suspicion of manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people, and another man at Stansted Airport regarding the same offences. On 27 October, it was announced that these three had been released on bail. After extended questioning, on 26 October Essex Police charged the driver they had arrested with 39 counts of manslaughter, conspiracy to traffic people, conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration and money laundering. He appeared at Chelmsford Magistrates' Court on 28 October, when the Crown Prosecution Service alleged that he was part of a "global ring" of people smugglers. He was remanded in custody, to appear at the Central Criminal Court on 25 November.
On 26 October, the Irish police said they had detained a man in his 20s at Dublin Port who was of interest to Essex Police as part of its investigation into the lorry deaths. He was charged with unrelated offences. A Belgian public prosecutor said that this was the lorry driver they had been searching for, who had been seen on CCTV ten times at Zeebrugge while dropping off the refrigerated trailer. Two days later, the prosecutor said that the lorry driver pretended that the trailer was filled with cookies and biscuits.
On 29 October, Essex Police announced that two brothers from Armagh, Northern Ireland, one of whom owned the haulage company operating the lorry cab detained at Grays, were wanted on suspicion of manslaughter and human trafficking offences related to the incident. On 20 April 2020, one of the brothers, a 40-year-old man, was arrested by Gardaí in the Republic of Ireland on a European Arrest Warrant and charged with 39 counts of manslaughter and immigration offences.
On 1 November, a man from Northern Ireland was re-arrested in the holding cells of the Criminal Courts of Justice in Dublin following the execution of a European Arrest Warrant issued in the UK. He was charged with 41 offences, including 39 of manslaughter, and extradition proceedings began in the Irish High Court. In February 2020, the man was given leave to appeal the extradition judgment.
On 4 November, Vietnamese police arrested eight suspects in the central province of Nghệ An in connection with the smuggling ring. In February 2020 five men and two women were charged in Vietnam with "organising or broking others to flee abroad or stay abroad illegally".
On 29 January 2020, a man from Essex, who was the subject of a European Arrest Warrant, was detained in Frankfurt. He was returned to the UK where he was charged with 39 counts of manslaughter and conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration.
On 9 February 2020, a man was arrested in Northern Ireland on suspicion of manslaughter and facilitating unlawful immigration, and was released on bail.
On 4 March 2020, a man from Essex was charged with an immigration offence related to the deaths. The offence allegedly occurred between May 2018 and October 2019.
On 16 March 2020, a man from Birmingham was charged with an immigration offence related to the incident. The man is accused of "conspiring to smuggle non-EU nationals into the UK, contrary to immigration law, between 1 May 2018 and 24 October 2019."
On 17 April 2020, a 42-year-old man from Tottenham was charged with an immigration offence related to the deaths. He is accused of "conspiracy to facilitate the commission of a breach of UK immigration law by a non-EU person".
On 20 April 2020 a 40-year-old man was arrested in the Republic of Ireland in connection with the deaths. He is due to appear in the High Court in Dublin on 21 April 2020. He will face 39 charges of manslaughter as well as immigration offences. On 29 April 2020 he appeared before the High Court via videolink, during which he was described as the "ringleader" of a criminal gang. His solicitor applied for bail and the prosecution opposed it, with the decision to be given by the judge on the following day. Bail was refused on 30 April.
On 26 May 2020 French and Belgian police announced the arrest of 26 people suspected of human trafficking in relation to the Essex lorry deaths. Authorities said a series of simultaneous early morning raids had taken place in both countries on 25 May 2020. The police operation was organised with a cross-border team organised by Eurojust that included Belgium, France, the UK and Ireland. Thirteen people were arrested in France.

Court appearances

On 25 November, the driver arrested in Grays pleaded guilty in the Central Criminal Court to conspiring with others to assist illegal immigration and acquiring criminal property. He was remanded in custody until 13 December when he appeared in court, via a video link from Belmarsh Prison in London where he was being held until his trial. On 8 April 2020, he pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of the 39 victims.
A second man, from County Armagh, also appeared at the Central Criminal Court on 13 December and pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit human trafficking offences between 1 May 2018 and 24 October 2019, by arranging or facilitating the travel of other people with a view to exploitation. He also denied conspiring to assist unlawful immigration over the same period, but did not enter any plea regarding 39 charges of manslaughter he was charged with.

Extradition hearing

On 15 May 2020 the man accused of being the ringleader attended the High Court in Ireland via video link from Cloverhill Prison in Dublin. Counsel for the defence argued that many of the alleged offences occurred outside the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom and that the extradition warrant was unclear about whether the United Kingdom was asserting that the alleged offences occurred in UK jurisdiction or were extraterritorial. Counsel for the Minister for Justice, Ronan Kennedy SC disagreed, calling the claim of extraterritoriality was a red herring and that the court should not engage in a "fanciful debate" whether other states had jurisdiction to try these offences. The counsel for the state pointed out that the 39 people died after the trailer had entered the UK and that it was non-sensical to suggest their deaths had occurred anywhere other than the UK. The fact that multiple locations were mentioned in the warrant did not mean that the offences were extraterritorial and the accused was in the UK and had acted to further an act of conspiracy that underpinned the charges of manslaughter. Judge Burns remanded the accused until 12 June 2020, when a judgement is expected to be delivered.

Reactions

United Kingdom

Political

said in a tweet that he was "appalled" at the incident, giving his thoughts to the victims and their families, adding that the Home Office was working alongside Essex Police on the case. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, said that she was "shocked and saddened by this utterly tragic incident", and that Immigration Enforcement were working with the Essex Police. António Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, tweeted that those responsible "must be swiftly brought to justice". Diane Abbott, Shadow Home Secretary, said greater international co-operation was needed to prevent similar events happening again.
Extra UK immigration officers are to be deployed at the Belgian border port of Zeebrugge and more Border Force staff will operate at Purfleet as a result of the incident.
Campaigners against human trafficking organised a vigil to take place outside the Home Office on 24 October in solidarity with the casualties. Following the incident, the Chief Executive of the charity group Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants said that the British government needs to open safe routes and make quick decisions regarding asylum seekers to prevent such attempts, sentiments echoed by the Refugee and Migrant Rights Director of Amnesty International UK. Other refugee groups have expressed concern that the border confusion surrounding Brexit will give more opportunities for groups to commit similar crimes.

Entertainment

postponed a television series called Smuggled that was due to air on 28 October, in which British citizens try to smuggle themselves from mainland Europe to the UK. The first part was broadcast on 4 November after re-editing in the light of the 39 deaths, despite the Home Office describing the timing as "both insensitive and irresponsible". Channel 4 defended its decision as meeting its public service obligations, arguing that revelation of the ease with which people could be smuggled into Britain had become a "matter of urgent public interest".

China

, China's ambassador to the UK, said in a tweet that the embassy was in "close contact with the British police to seek clarification and confirmation of the relevant reports" and that "we read with heavy heart the reports about the death of 39 people".
In an editorial headlined, "The UK must bear responsibility," the Global Times, a state-run newspaper, said that the responsibility of the deaths lay with Britain and other European countries. This was when the victims were still believed to be of Chinese origin.
Later, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs criticised a CNN reporter's question, which had contrasted the incident with the Chinese government's depiction of a more economically prosperous China. The question was then further criticised by Chinese media after the victims were found not to be Chinese.
In the CNN report, this question was described to be "about the possibility of Chinese citizens being illegally trafficked" and "was rebuffed by the spokesperson".

Vietnam

Political

After reports that Vietnamese citizens might be among the deceased, Nguyễn Xuân Phúc, Vietnamese Prime Minister, ordered the country's Public Security Ministry and the authorities of its two central provinces of Hà Tĩnh and Nghệ An, where a number of missing citizens come from, to launch a probe on the case. He also urged his country's Foreign Ministry to direct the Vietnamese embassy in UK to closely monitor the situation, co-ordinate with the British authorities to verify the identities or the victims and take protective measures in case it was confirmed Vietnamese are among them. After confirmation that they were all from Vietnam, the Vietnamese government strongly condemned human trafficking and called on all countries to combat such activities to prevent a recurrence of the incident.

Families of casualties

Families of those who died told reporters that they had been told that neither the British nor Vietnamese governments were willing to cover the cost of repatriating the bodies back to their homes. The deputy chair of the Can Lộc District, had reportedly been told by officials that the Vietnamese government offered to only pay the costs of bringing the bodies "home from the airport" and would pay in advance on behalf of the families only if the families would later pay them back. A father of one of the deceased said he was given two options: having the ashes returned for 41,100,000 Vietnam dong or receiving the body for 66,240,000 Vietnam dong.
An international fundraiser through GoFundMe raised money to help cover the potential additional debts that the families might incur bringing home the deceased. Additionally, money was donated by Vingroup, and other Vietnamese associations across Europe. By the end of November, all bodies had been repatriated to Vietnam. Families were worried they could still be left in debt, despite over £84,000 having been raised to help them.