Police to file charges against 8 people for migrant deaths – UPDATE

Budapest, October 12 (MTI) – Police are to file charges against 8 suspects in connection with the deaths of 71 migrants left locked up in a refrigerated truck on a roadside in Austria last year, an official in charge of migration issues at operational police’s national investigations bureau said on Wednesday.

The search is still on for three Bulgarian drivers, Zoltán Boross told a press conference.

When the suspects crossed the Hungarian-Austrian border, they already knew that the people in the vehecle were dead, he added.

An Afghan citizen in Hungary who had lived under protection headed the criminal gang. His protection has since been withdrawn. Among the eight people currently under pre-trial detention are a Bulgarian-Lebanese man whose task was to acquire the vehicles needed for human smuggling and Bulgarian citizens who acted as drivers. One of the suspects is the 25-year-old man who drove the refrigerated vehicle, Boross said.

UPDATE

Police were unable to track the trail of the gang’s profits but suspect that the ring leader had sent the money to Afghanistan, Boross said. The money was transported either in bags in the form of cash or sent to Afghanistan via an untraceable wire transfer, he added.

Boross revealed that police had found a purchase agreement in the truck which indicated that the vehicle was bought in Kecskemet, in central Hungary.

During the investigation police obtained about 1,500 hours of CCTV footage from 24 sections of the route the criminals had followed from Hungary’s southern border to Austria.

Like the Austrian investigation, the Hungarian one also concluded that it took no more than 3 hours for the migrants to die of suffocation after being locked inside the truck.

It was also revealed that the Afghan ring leader first came to Hungary in 2013. During his time in Hungary he had multiple run-ins with the law, most of which were over drug-related crimes, rowdiness and speeding.