LONDON (Reuters) - A British truck driver accused of murdering 39 Vietnamese whose bodies were found in a truck near London last month has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to help with illegal immigration.
Morris Robinson, 25, from Northern Ireland, appeared on Monday in a videoconference from Belmarsh prison in east London. He was not asked to plead guilty to 41 other charges, including 39 counts of murder.
The date of the trial has not yet been set, and Robinson is scheduled to appear again in court on 13 December.
Robinson admitted to conspiring with others from May 1, 2018 to October 24 this year, to commit a violation of assistance in irregular migration, as well as to obtain money he knew or suspected of originating criminal operations.
British police on Sunday charged another man from Northern Ireland of helping bring 39 illegal immigrants to Britain.
Police in Vietnam arrested 10 people in connection with the incident.
The bodies were found on 23 October, including eight bodies of women in a shipping container in an industrial area in Essex, not far from the Thames.
The discovery of the bodies highlighted the human trafficking that brings the poor from Asia, the Middle East and Africa through a dangerous journey, often after paying exorbitant amounts of smuggling gangs, to Western Europe.
Most of the victims found in the truck were from Nh An and Ha Tinh provinces in north-central Vietnam, where job shortages and other factors are driving people to emigrate.
At Monday's hearing at London's Old Bailey, prosecutor William Emlin Jones said the case was likely to widen and complicate.
In Britain's biggest irregular migration incident, customs officials in 2000 found the bodies of 58 Chinese stacked inside a tomato truck in the southern port of Dover.