Essex lorry deaths: Police continue to question driver

Police are continuing to question a lorry driver over 39 people found dead in a refrigerated trailer in Essex.

Mo Robinson, 25, from Portadown, County Armagh, was arrested on suspicion of murder on Wednesday by Essex Police.

Officers in Northern Ireland have raided two houses and the National Crime Agency said it was working to identify “organised crime groups who may have played a part”.

The trailer arrived in Purfleet on the River Thames from Zeebrugge, Belgium.

• Essex lorry deaths: What we know
• How many migrants die entering the UK?

Ambulance staff discovered the bodies in the container at Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays just after 01:30 BST on Wednesday. The lorry and trailer left the port at Purfleet shortly after 01:05.

Eric Van Duyse, a spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office, said an investigation into the incident was under way.

He added: “We have no idea at the moment how long the lorry spent in Belgium, it could be hours or days, we just don’t know.”

Police said the tractor unit (the front part of the lorry) came from Northern Ireland and picked up the trailer from Purfleet.

Deputy Chief Constable of Essex Police Pippa Mills said the vehicle had been moved to a secure site at Tilbury Docks so the bodies of the 38 adults and one teenager could be “recovered while preserving the dignity of the victims”.

A spokesman for the Bulgarian foreign affairs ministry said the truck was registered in the country under the name of a company owned by an Irish citizen.

He said it was “highly unlikely” the deceased were Bulgarians.

How many migrants have died in transit?

The number of migrants who die in transit has been recorded by the UN since 2014.

Since then, five bodies of suspected migrants have been found in lorries or containers in the UK:

• 2014: An Afghan migrant was found dead at Tilbury Docks, Essex. He was in a shipping container, with 34 Afghans who survived
• 2015: Two migrants were found dead in a wooden crate in a warehouse in Branston, Staffordshire. The crate had been sent from Italy
• 2016: An 18-year-old migrant was crushed while clinging to the underside of a lorry in Banbury, Oxfordshire
• 2016: A body was found in the back of a lorry in Kent, which had travelled from France

Data was not collected in the same way before the migrant crisis began in 2014, but such deaths are not new.

In 2000, 58 Chinese migrants were found suffocated to death in a lorry at Dover.

In 2015, the bodies of 71 people were found in an abandoned lorry on an Austrian motorway. Police suspected the vehicle was part of a Bulgarian-Hungarian human trafficking operation.

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