Austrian migrant tragedy suspects in court as second lorry found

Three children are in a critical condition after being rescued from a lorry in Austria that contained 26 migrants, police said. The lorry was stopped in Braunau district yesterday and the Romanian driver was arrested after a chase, reports said. Four suspects in the deaths of 71 migrants found in an abandoned truck in Austria arrived today for a court hearing in Hungary. Prosecutors said they wanted the three Bulgarians and one Afghan remanded in custody for a month while investigations into Thursday’s tragedy continue.

[They should be jailed] due to the exceptional nature of the crime, the subsequent deaths of the smuggled persons and the perpetration of the criminal act of people-smuggling in a businesslike manner.

Hungarian prosecutors

The four suspects – two of them appearing to be in their 30s and the others around 50 years old – were in separate cars that arrived in a convoy into the courtyard of the courthouse in Kecskemet, some 90 kilometres (55 miles) south of Budapest. Police believe the men are low-ranking members of one of the numerous and often unscrupulous human trafficking gangs that prey on many of the tens of thousands migrants coming to Europe.

World migrants