At least eighteen people have been found dead in a truck in Bulgaria. According to the BTA news agency, these are Afghan migrants. Three people have been arrested in connection with the find.
The truck was abandoned in a village not far from the Bulgarian capital Sofia. More than fifty people were found lying in a hiding place under a batch of wood. Eighteen of them, reportedly including a young child, had died.
The victims probably suffocated. Interior Minister Medjidiev says the occupants had a lack of oxygen. “They were hypothermic and wet and hadn’t eaten in days.”
Driver was missing
The other more than thirty survivors have been taken to hospitals. According to the minister, some of them are in a critical but stable condition. According to television channel BNT, the truck came from the direction of the Turkish border and was on its way to the border with Serbia.
The driver was nowhere to be seen at the time of the discovery. At the beginning of the evening, the authorities announced that three people had been arrested. It is still unclear whether the driver is among the detainees.
England and Austria
Similar dramas have played out elsewhere in Europe. In 2019, 39 Vietnamese were found dead in a refrigerated truck in England. Two years earlier, a truck with more than seventy suffocated migrants was found on an emergency lane in Austria.
Bulgaria has been struggling for some time with the increasing number of migrants trying to enter the country, often en route to other EU countries. Recently, the government has significantly increased the number of border guards at the Turkish border.
