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The migrants made desperate attempts to call Vietnamese family members and emergency services when they realized they were suffocating in a container during their sea voyage to England, the Old Bailey has heard.
Criminals accused of arranging the transport of 39 Vietnamese may have loaded two loads of human cargo into a truck, out of a greedy desire to secure payment of £ 10,000 per head for each passenger, the court reported. Temperatures inside the container rose rapidly and the oxygen was depleted long before the container reached the UK.
Some of the victims tried to get out of the truck with a metal pole during the crossing without success. “There was no way out, no one to listen to them, no one to help them,” William Emlyn Jones, prosecutor, told the court on the third day of the human trafficking trial.
A selfie taken by a passenger, hours before he died, shows his sweating from the extreme heat; many of the passengers stripped to their underwear inside the cargo container.
Once the container was loaded onto a ship in Zeebrugge to the UK, there was no mobile reception, but the recordings found on the 50 phones recovered by the police revealed several goodbye messages for relatives.
Nguyen Tho Tuan recorded a message for his wife, son and mother, saying, “It is Tuan. Sorry. I can’t take care of you. Sorry. Sorry. I can’t breathe. I want to go back to my family. Have a good life. ”
In another recording, a male voice says: “I can’t breathe. Sorry. I have to go now. “A voice was audible in the background of one of the recordings saying,” He’s dead. “
A detailed account of the journey made by the 39 passengers, aged between 15 and 44, on the day of their death, emerged as evidence collected from mobile phone records, text messages recovered between the alleged accomplices, CCTV images and license plate images. automatic. reconnaissance cameras.
Many of the victims, ten of whom were teenagers, traveled from Paris on the morning of October 22 and were taken by taxi to a farm shed near the northern French town of Bierne, where a truck driven by a truck stopped. defendant, Eamonn Harrison. . A witness said he saw several people, whom he described as migrants, run out of the shed and climb into the back of the truck.
Harrison subsequently dropped the container in Zeebrugge and the truck driver, Maurice Robinson, picked it up from Purfleet port around 1 a.m. on October 23, by which time all 39 passengers had been inside the sealed container. for 12 hours. The naval worker who unloaded the container from the ship noticed a “pungent smell” coming from inside.
Robinson, the driver in charge of picking up the container at the port of Essex, received a text message from his boss, Ronan Hughes, instructing him to stop the truck just six minutes after leaving the port. “Give them air quickly but don’t let them out,” he said.
“This message reveals that the conspirators knew they had been taking a very serious risk by loading the trailer as full as they had. Of course, they were right to be concerned. However, they were too late, ”Emlyn Jones told the court.
Black and white CCTV footage reproduced on the pitch shows Robinson opening the container doors on a deserted street; a cloud of steam is seen coming from the rear of the vehicle. He took a step back and stood for 90 seconds looking at the scene inside.
Robinson waited 15 minutes before calling 999, first contacting his co-conspirators after discovering the bodies and then driving the truck around the block, before deciding to stop again and call an ambulance.
“I am a truck driver. I just lifted a trailer from the port. There are many of them. There are immigrants behind. They are all lying on the floor, ”he told the 999 caller.“ I heard the noise in the back and opened the door, there are a lot of them lying down. The trailer is stuck. There are about 25. They are not breathing. “
The caller asked him to describe the precise condition of the people inside the container, but Robinson said he did not dare to return to the vehicle. “I really don’t want to look inside, to be honest with you.”
Gheorghe Nica 43, and Harrison, 23, deny 39 counts of murder. Harrison, Christopher Kennedy, 24, and Valentin Calota, 37, deny being part of a broader human smuggling operation, which Nica has admitted.
Four other defendants have already admitted their involvement in the people smuggling plot. Among them are Robinson, 26, and Hughes, 41, who have admitted to manslaughter.
