This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service - if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at http://ift.tt/jcXqJW.
Saturday 29 Aug 2015 - 14:42 Makkah mean time-14-11-1436
 Vienna (IINA) - Hungary said Friday it has arrested four people over the discovery of 71 decomposing bodies in an abandoned truck in Austria, another grim tragedy involving migrants desperately seeking refuge in Europe.
In the horrific incident — a rare occurrence on land in a prosperous country when so many migrants have died at sea — Austrian police said the dead were likely Syrians and included a toddler and three young boys. “Among these 71 people, there were 59 men, eight women and four children including a young girl one or two years old and three boys aged eight, nine or 10,” police spokesman Hans Peter Doskozil told a news conference. He said the time and cause of death still had to be determined but there was a “certain probability” they had suffocated in the truck, found Thursday on a motorway near the Hungarian border.
Meanwhile, Libyan rescue workers recovered 76 bodies from yet another capsized boat crammed with people fleeing across the Mediterranean from conflict in the Middle East and Africa. The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, said as many as 200 people on two boats were feared dead near the western port of Zuwara. Hungarian police said they had arrested three Bulgarians and an Afghan and had raided several addresses and confiscated items over the Austria truck discovery.
A spokesman for Hungary’s chief prosecutor told AFP a court would decide on Saturday whether they would be detained beyond an initial 72-hour period.
Austria will likely seek to have the suspects extradited, possibly even on murder charges, the country’s public prosecutor Johann Fuchs said. Doskozil said those arrested included the owner of the vehicle and two drivers, and were likely “low-ranking members... of a Bulgarian-Hungarian human-trafficking gang.”
Austrian motorway maintenance workers alerted police after noticing “decomposing body fluids” dripping from the vehicle, Doskozil said. Police were then confronted by an overpowering stench and a mass of tangled limbs and forensics experts worked all night to clear out the vehicle.
The state of the corpses suggested that those inside had been dead for some time. Television images showed flies buzzing around the back of the vehicle in the baking sun. Austrian newspaper Kurier carried a black front page with the headline: “Who will stop this madness?” German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in Austria Thursday for a summit with Balkan leaders on the migrant crisis, said those present were “shaken” by the “horrible” news.
“This is a warning to us to tackle this migrants issue quickly and in a European spirit, which means in a spirit of solidarity, and to find solutions,” she said.
European Union leaders have struggled to get to grips with a crisis that has seen nearly 340,000 migrants cross the bloc’s borders this year — not counting August — and many have come from hotspots like Iraq and Syria. Millions of other refugees have sought refuge in places like Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan. Merkel said Friday that EU leaders could hold a special summit on the crisis, but that such a gathering “must be able to take certain decisions.”
European interior and transport ministers gathering in Paris Saturday to discuss security measures following the thwarted train attack in France will also touch on the migration issue. “If the stink from our car parks gets stronger perhaps we will finally understand, not just in Austria... that it is time to create safe routes to Europe, fast registration and a swift and a fair sharing out (of migrants),” said Amnesty International’s Austrian chief Heinz Patzelt.
HA/IINA
|
No comments:
Post a Comment