Arrests made over refugee truck tragedy
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By Staff Writers, Sputnik
Sputnik
Friday, Aug 28, 2015
Three suspects have been arrested in connection to the death of 71 people found in a truck on a highway in Austria, representatives of the country's Interior Ministry and police confirmed at a press conference on Friday.
On Thursday, an abandoned refrigerated vehicle with the bodies of 71 people, believed to be migrants, was discovered about 28 miles southeast of the Austrian capital of Vienna and about 16 miles from the Hungarian and Slovak borders. Earlier on Friday, the Austrian newspaper Krone reported that several people had been arrested in Hungary in connection to the truck case.
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| © AFP 2015/ DIETER NAGL |
Police said at the press conference on Friday that the migrants had been squeezed into a the back of the van, where they had virtually no source of oxygen, while the driver drove non-stop from the Serbian border to Austria, ignoring repeated requests to open the truck.
Of the 71 migrants, 59 were men, eight were women and four were children, including a baby girl aged between one and two, according to police. A Syrian travel document was found on one of the deceased.
Estimates from the European Union's external border protection agency Frontex, show that over 340,000 migrants were detected at the 28-nation bloc's external borders between January and July 2015, which is three times higher than during the same period in 2014.
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