Grisly Discovery in Migrant Crisis Shocks Europe

By ALISON SMALE and MELISSA EDDYAUG. 27, 2015

VIENNA — The legions of desperate migrants fleeing war and mayhem in the Middle East and Africa have long known they were risking harm from unscrupulous smugglers and death at sea to reach the safety of Europe. But it became shockingly clear on Thursday that they now face the same dangers within Europe’s own borders.

A white truck filled with the decomposing bodies of as many as 50 smuggled migrants was found abandoned on the outskirts of Vienna in the summer heat. The discovery came just as European leaders were meeting in a nearby palace to devise new ways to cope with the migration crisis.

News about the corpses instantly overshadowed the meeting and transfixed Europe with new worries that the scope and complexity of the crisis had escalated.

European Union officials have been struggling for ways to control the tens of thousands of migrants who are now reaching the continent, without forfeiting the free movement between member countries that is a fundamental part of life in the 28-nation bloc. Now its members are confronting human traffickers who are exploiting the open borders.

“We are all shaken by this terrible news that up to 50 people have lost their lives because they got into a situation where smugglers did not care about their lives,” said Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, at a news conference at the Vienna meeting. “Such a tragic death.”

Ms. Merkel emphasized what she called the need for Europe to pull together and ease the migration crisis, part of the biggest wave of migrants since World War II. But the meeting ended on a discordant note with no apparent consensus on how to proceed.

The death toll at sea is already greater than 2,500 and is rising almost every day, with news reports on Thursday that a ship carrying hundreds of migrants had sunk off the coast of Libya. Now the truck discovery has made it clear that the illegal trade in humans has broadened from arranging perilous journeys across the Mediterranean to profiteering from the tens of thousands now pouring in through the Balkans.

Until recently, the flow was mostly restricted to the southern countries, particularly Italy. But as new routes through Greece and the Balkans have become popular, the pressure to stem the flow has broadened and deepened.

The people in the truck were thought to be among the migrants on their way through Central Europe and toward the wealthier countries — particularly Germany — in the north.

An abandoned truck on the outskirts of Vienna was found to have the bodies of up to 50 people. Credit Roland Schlager/European Pressphoto Agency

The precise death toll had yet to be determined by Thursday night, but more than 20 bodies — and as many as 50 — were believed to be in the truck, said Hans Peter Doskozil, director of the police in the eastern state of Burgenland. He added that the count was hindered by the advanced state of decomposition.

The discovery was made after a highway worker alerted the police around 11:40 a.m. that the truck, with Hungarian license plates, was parked in the emergency lane of a highway that links Budapest and Vienna, in the Neusiedl am See region, near the Hungarian border. Mr. Doskozil said the truck had probably set off from east of Budapest on Wednesday, and was abandoned either late that night or early Thursday.

Janos Lazar, chief of staff to Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, said that the authorities believed the truck had been part of a human trafficking operation, and that the victims “were illegal migrants who were trying to reach the West through Hungary or with the help of Hungarians.”

Hungarian officials said they had assigned investigators to help the Austrians with the case.

Mr. Doskozil said the investigators would comb the cab of the truck to establish the identity of the driver. By afternoon, the authorities said the truck had been towed to an undisclosed location where the bodies could be removed and identified.

“It is clear that this is a case of organized criminality where a lot of money is at stake and business is made out of human suffering,” Mr. Doskozil said.

The discovery was a new twist on a summer of tragedy for migrants, who have drowned at sea by the hundreds and been injured or worse in accidents during their attempts to reach safety and jobs in the European Union.

Just a day earlier, Italian officials announced the discovery of 50 bodies in the hold of a ship that appeared to have departed Libya bound for Italy.

The Balkan overland route has replaced the Mediterranean passage as the favored route for migrants this summer. The change has severely affected Austria, which has been struggling to cope with the masses of migrants, and officials have grown increasingly concerned about smugglers.

Eighty suspected smugglers were detained between July 1 and Aug. 1 of this year, bringing the overall number to 278, the Interior Ministry said. But this is only a fraction of the more than 800 investigations into people-smuggling brought this year by prosecutors nationwide, many against unknown perpetrators, the ministry said.

An abandoned truck carrying the dead bodies of people assumed to be migrants was found in Austria on Thursday. Credit Roland Schlager/European Pressphoto Agency

Defendants convicted of smuggling for money face prison sentences of up to two years for a first offense, and up to five years for repeat offenders. Defendants convicted of “endangering the lives of others” or belonging to a criminal ring can face up to 10 years in prison.

Many migrants entering Hungary from Serbia are processed in a rudimentary way in southern Hungary and then take trains — at no charge — from the southern city of Szeged to Budapest.

Once there, they are discouraged from taking trains to Austria by the Hungarian authorities, who are responding with tough measures. Last weekend, the Hungarian police made an example of illegal travelers, hauling at least 175 people off a train headed west toward Munich, volunteer organizations said.

The nongovernmental groups say this sort of action encourages — albeit unintentionally — a tendency among the migrants to cross into Austria by road, hiding in taxis, private cars or trucks.

The meeting of European leaders ended not only inconclusively but also with outright dissent by the foreign ministers of Serbia and Macedonia, two nations on the path of the new route, who complained that they were not getting enough help to cope with the influx.

“Unless we have a European answer to this issue, none of us should be under any illusion that this will be solved,” Foreign Minister Nikola Poposki of Macedonia said.

Hungary’s hard line with the migrants has included the accelerated building of a fence along the border with Serbia in an effort to block the flow of tens of thousands who have worked their way up the length of the Balkans in recent weeks.

The border fence has threatened to complicate and even cut off what has become an increasingly accessible route for the migrants. In recent interviews, humanitarian aid workers and the migrants themselves said the fence would not stop the migrants but would force them to find other ways to make it to wealthy European Union countries farther north, often with the help of human traffickers.

The conference in Vienna Thursday was originally intended to foster rapprochement among the nations of the Western Balkans, who themselves fought wars in the 1990s that produced what was then Europe’s largest post-1945 wave of refugees.

Germany and others are anxious to classify all the former Yugoslav states, and Albania, as safe countries so that their inhabitants desist from seeking asylum in Germany, choking accommodation and other resources needed for migrants from the Middle East and Africa.

But the current migrant crisis had already forced its way on to the agenda in recent weeks, and Thursday’s tragedy overshadowed any attempts to resolve the region’s problems.

Ms. Merkel, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, and Balkan heads of government attended the conference. Ms. Merkel and Chancellor Werner Faymann of Austria, expressing sorrow over the deaths, called them a chilling reminder of the need to give shelter to migrants fleeing war.

“This shows once more how necessary it is to save lives and to fight people smugglers,” Mr. Faymann said.

“Those who look back to World War II history know that there were people who depended then on asylum” to survive. Today, too, “it saves lives,” he added.

Images in the Austrian news media showed a white vehicle with a rear cooler compartment, emblazoned with the word “Hyza” in brown letters, with a chicken standing in for the letter Y, surrounded by police cars. A Slovakia-based company by the name of Hyza told the Austrian news agency APA that it had sold more than a dozen of its vehicles in 2014 but that it had no further knowledge about them.

Austria’s interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, called it a “dark day” and urged everyone across the European Union to move harshly against human traffickers. “These are not well-minded helpers,” she said. “They are not concerned with the welfare of the migrants. They care only about profit.”

Alison Smale reported from Vienna, and Melissa Eddy from Berlin. Palko Karasz contributed reporting from London.

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