Four members of a people-smuggling gang have each been jailed for 25 years in Hungary for letting 71 people suffocate inside a lorry that was then dumped at the side of an Austrian motorway.
The four men – one Afghan and three Bulgarians – were found guilty of “aggravated murder with particular cruelty” after a year-long trial in the town of Kecskemét, which took over the proceedings from Vienna after it emerged that the migrants suffocated in Hungary.
Ten other suspects were found guilty of various charges and handed prison sentences of between three and 12 years.
The victims – 59 men, eight women and four children, including a baby – came from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Having made their way to the Serbian border with Hungary, they were packed into an air-tight poultry refrigerator lorry, where their pleas to stop for fresh air were ignored.
Realising what had happened, the driver abandoned the lorry. Austrian police later found the bodies piled on top of each other inside. Investigations found they had been dead for two days, having suffocated shortly after being picked up in Hungary, then a key transit country on the Balkan migrant trail.
The deaths in August 2015 led the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, to announce she would open her country’s borders to refugees, eventually allowing in more than one million, mostly from Syria.
