{UAH} Dead migrants found in lorry container ‘had to pay £30,000’

Frank Mujabi,/ Alan Barigye

See how much illegal migrants were prepared to pay human traffickers to get to the UK. No wonder Kayibanda Rubatasirwa is stinking rich because he controls all of the people trafficking routes to the Middle East and beyond.

Bobby

Dead migrants found in lorry container 'had to pay £30,000'

 by Daniel BinnsPublished October 25, 2019

THIRTY-NINE migrants who were found dead in a lorry may have been charged more than £30,000 each by people smugglers for their doomed journey.

The eight women and 31 men who were found in a refrigerated container on Wednesday were all from China, police revealed yesterday. It came as judges granted detectives an extra 24 hours to question the lorry driver, named locally as Mo Robinson.

The migrants reportedly froze in temperatures as low as -25C before their bodies were discovered at Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays, Essex.

Campaign group Stop the Traffik said there were likely to be 'significant similarities' with the case in 2000 of 58 Chinese nationals found dead in a sealed, airless container on a lorry in Dover.

Smugglers then charged the victims around £20,000 each, but latest research suggests migrants from south-east Asia now pay in excess of £30,000. Stop the Traffik director Neil Giles told Metro: 'People who are trafficked from China are frequently subjected to coercion and control, including debt bondage. Often these debts never get repaid because of interest charges and unpaid labour.

'The victims would have most likely led lives of exploitation, largely under the radar.'

Painstaking investigation: Police conduct a fingertip search in Grays PICTURE: ESSEX NEWS

The UK's Independent anti-slavery commissioner said some Vietnamese migrants were charged £33,000 by smugglers.

Meanwhile, one of Mr Robinson's friends told Mail Online the 25-year-old found the bodies after he went to 'fetch paperwork', before calling an ambulance. Another report claimed a witness saw him faint when he made the horrific discovery.

Police have searched three addresses in Northern Ireland. Councillor Paul Berry said the village of Laurelvale, where the Robinson family live, was in 'complete shock'.

Essex Police Dep Ch Con Pippa Mills said: 'Our recovery of the bodies is ongoing and the post-mortem and identification processes, which will be lengthy and complex, can then begin.'

The container arrived at Purfleet docks, Essex, from Zeebrugge, Belgium, about an hour before paramedics were called. The cab came from Northern Ireland via Holyhead on Sunday. The National Crime Agency has warned quieter ports such as Purfleet are a target for people smugglers. There has also been a rise in smuggling from Belgium after a migrant camp closed.

■ AN ESSEX taxi driver said he has often seen lorries stopping overnight near the site of the tragedy and migrants getting out.

'I've seen ten people here in Grays over the last few years, they don't speak English, they've got a piece of paper and a mobile phone,' he told BBC News.

'All they do is they come up, they hand you a phone. Some English-speaking person on the phone [tells you] to take them to a certain address in different parts of London.

'That's been going on since I got back on the taxis five or six years ago.

'It is desperate. They are all different nationalities, you can't just pinpoint it to one area.'

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