In 2019, 39 refugees were discovered suffocated in a truck in Great Britain. After trials against the smugglers in Vietnam, Belgium and Great Britain, verdicts have now been passed against 18 people involved in Paris.
Four years after 39 Vietnamese refugees were found suffocated in a refrigerated truck container in Great Britain, 18 members of a smuggling ring in France have been sentenced to up to ten years in prison. A court in Paris found four defendants from Vietnam guilty of negligent homicide. They have to go to prison for nine or ten years. Four other Vietnamese received between one and ten years in prison for their involvement in transporting or accommodating the refugees. One defendant was acquitted, the others received suspended sentences.
Lack of oxygen and overheating
The refugees boarded the truck container in northern France and was then driven to Great Britain via Zeebrugge in Belgium. The bodies of the Vietnamese refugees, aged between 15 and 44, were discovered in an industrial area east of London at the end of October 2019. According to the autopsy report, the people locked in the container died from lack of oxygen and overheating.
The victims included eight women and two 15-year-old boys. 26-year-old Pham Thi Tra My had sent a final text message to her family from the truck: “Mom, Dad, I love you very much. I’m dying, I can’t breathe anymore.” Other gang members had already been sentenced to prison in Vietnam, Great Britain and Belgium. The two leaders of the human trafficking ring were sentenced to 27 and 20 years in prison in Great Britain.