View of the refrigerated truck where 39 bodies were found on October 23 near London.
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Humphrey Nemar / Mirrorpix / SIPA
Four people are on trial, from Monday in London, for manslaughter or for helping illegal immigration, a year after the discovery of 39 Vietnamese migrants dead in a refrigerated truck in England.
Two other defendants, the driver of the lorry in which the bodies were found and a Northern Irishman suspected of having organized the movement of the drivers involved in the traffic, who pleaded guilty, will be the subject of a subsequent hearing to determine their hardly.
" I can not breath anymore "
Aged 23 to 43, the four men whose trial opens in the criminal court of the Old Bailey in London, are being prosecuted for manslaughter or for helping illegal immigration.
They contest the offenses with which they are accused.
On October 23, 2019, the bodies of 31 men and eight women, including two 15-year-old teenagers, were found aboard a container in the Grays industrial area, east London.
The container came from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge.
Among the victims, Pham Thi Tra My, 26, had sent a chilling SMS to his relatives, a few hours before the discovery of the bodies: “Mum, dad, I love you very much.
I'm dying, I can't breathe anymore ”.
Many of the victims of this tragedy were from a poor region in central Vietnam, where families are going into debt to the tune of thousands of dollars to send one of their own to the United Kingdom, via clandestine channels, in the hope that they will find gainful employment there.
Semi-slavery
The drama has brought to light the dangers of illegal immigration, with unscrupulous traffickers taking advantage of applicants' vulnerabilities, the latter often ending up in nail bars or illegal cannabis farms in the UK, reduced to a state of semi-slavery.
Seven people were sentenced on September 15 in Vietnam for their role in trafficking, the first criminal sanctions pronounced in this case.
A court in Ha Tinh province (central) handed down four Vietnamese between the ages of 26 and 36, sentences ranging from two and a half to seven and a half years in prison.
They were found guilty of participating to varying degrees in “the organization of the smuggling of migrants”.
Three others were given suspended prison terms.
Old ferries to hold asylum seekers
Investigations were also opened in France and Belgium, 13 suspects were charged in each of the two countries.
They had been arrested during a vast international police operation, coordinated by the judicial cooperation body Eurojust.
The British government, which made post-Brexit immigration control a hobbyhorse, recently faced a record number of attempts to cross the Channel from France, in often sketchy boats, using smugglers .
On Sunday, Home Secretary Priti Patel announced a major overhaul of the UK asylum system, without specifying the details.
Proposals such as detaining applicants on old ferries or even on disused platforms in the North Sea or on the British Isles in the middle of the Atlantic have been mentioned by the press.
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