A truck in which British police found the bodies of 39 people was registered in Bulgaria by a company owned by an Irishwoman, Bulgaria’s foreign ministry says.
The discovery of the bodies – 38 adults and a teenager – was made in the early hours of Wednesday local time after emergency services were alerted to people in a truck container on a gritty industrial site in Grays, about 32km east of central London.
The truck was thought to have entered Britain at Holyhead, a North Wales port that is a major entry point for traffic from Ireland, on Saturday and to have originally started its journey in Bulgaria, police said.
The driver of the truck, a 25-year-old man from Northern Ireland, has been arrested on suspicion of murder and is in custody. The Bulgarian embassy in London received information about the registration from British police, the ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
“The Scania truck was registered in the city of Varna under the name of a company owned by an Irish citizen,” the ministry said.
Bulgarian public broadcaster BNR, citing unnamed sources, said the truck, which has been registered in Bulgaria on June 19, 2017, had left the Balkan country the next day and has not returned since.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was appalled by the news and was receiving regular updates about the investigation.
“We know that this trade is going on – all such traders in human beings should be hunted down and brought to justice,” he said.
All those in the container were pronounced dead at the scene after the emergency services were called to the Waterglade Industrial Park, not far from docks on the River Thames. Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said Irish authorities would carry out any investigations necessary if it was established that the truck had passed through Ireland.
Police officers in forensic suits were inspecting a large white container on a red truck next to warehouses at the site. Police had sealed off the surrounding area of the estate with large green barriers as they carried out their investigation.
“At this stage, we have not identified where the victims are from or their identities and we anticipate this could be a lengthy process,” Essex Police Deputy Chief Const Pippa Mills told reporters. “This is an absolute tragedy.”
Mills said finding out who the victims were was their top priority, while a key line of inquiry was determining the truck’s route from Bulgaria to Ireland and then on to Britain.
Source: NewsHub
Featured Image: A truck in which British police found the bodies of 39 people. Photo / Al Jazeera
