British police investigating the deaths of 39 people in a refrigerated truck on Saturday charged the driver with manslaughter and people trafficking, as families in Vietnam expressed fear their loved ones were among the dead.
Maurice Robinson was arrested shortly after the bodies of eight women and 31 men were discovered in the truck in an industrial zone in Grays in Essex, southeast England.
The 25-year-old from Northern Ireland was “charged with 39 counts of manslaughter, conspiracy to traffic people, conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration and money laundering,” Essex police said.
The truck’s driver is due in court today.
Four more people were in custody in the UK over the investigation, the country’s largest murder probe since the 2005 London suicide bombings.
A Northern Irish man was also arrested in Dublin on Saturday.
Police initially said the victims — believed to have arrived on a ferry from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge — were Chinese, but retracted this and now many are feared to be Vietnamese.
Vietnamese Ambassador to the UK Tran Ngoc An visited police investigating the case and also spoke on the telephone to British Secretary of State for the Home Department Priti Patel, the embassy said.
In Vietnam, several families told reporters that their relatives had gone missing on route to the UK, a prime destination for migrants seeking better lives abroad.
All the families come from impoverished and remote corners of central Vietnam, a hotspot for people willing to embark on dangerous journeys in the hope of striking it rich abroad.
Many are smuggled illegally through Russia or China, often owing tens of thousands of US dollars to their traffickers and carrying falsified documents, and end up working off the books on cannabis farms or in nail salons.
Britain-based community group VietHome said it had received “photos of nearly 20 people reported missing, age 15-45” from Vietnam.
Families of missing Vietnamese migrants on Saturday held vigil and set up makeshift altars in their homes in Nghe An Province, where many of the suspected victims came from, praying for news from missing relatives.
The family of a 26-year-old Vietnamese woman, Pham Thi Tra My, said on Friday they received a chilling text message from her in the hours before she is believed to have died.
Their home province of Ha Tinh was devastated by a massive fish kill in 2016, when Ha Tinh Steel Corp, a subsidiary of Taiwan-based Formosa Plastics, dumped toxic waste into the ocean.
Among the suspects still in custody was a 38-year-old woman reported to be the registered owner of the truck, and her husband, also 38.
They denied any involvement, according to media reports.
“We’ve got to be realistic. We know that ... we have people coming into the country, either being trafficked or as asylum seekers,” British police Detective Chief Inspector Martin Pasmore told reporters on Saturday.
“It must be clear that criminals — and that’s what we’re dealing with, criminals, murderers — are taking more and more chances with these vulnerable people,” he added.
He appealed to the Vietnamese community in the UK for information, saying his force would take no action against anyone there illegally who came forward to claim a friend or relative.
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