Bulgarian police discovered an abandoned truck on Friday containing the bodies of 18 migrants, who appeared to have suffocated to death inside a secret compartment under a load of wood.
The Interior Ministry said that according to initial information, the truck was carrying about 40 migrants and the survivors were taken to nearby hospitals for emergency treatment.
Bulgarian Health Minister Assen Medzhidiev said most of the survivors were in very poor condition.
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“They have suffered from lack of oxygen, their clothes are wet, they are freezing and obviously they haven’t eaten for days,” Medzhidiev said.
The truck was found abandoned along a highway near the capital, Sofia. The driver was not there, but the police discovered the passengers in a secret compartment under the wood that was also carrying the vehicle.
Authorities did not immediately release the nationalities of the migrants. Bulgarian media reported that they were all from Afghanistan.
Bulgaria, a Balkan country of 7 million people, is on a major route for migrants from the Middle East and Afghanistan to Europe. Only a small number of them plan to stay in the poorest member of the European Union, using Bulgaria as a transit corridor on their way west.
Bulgarian police found the bodies of 18 migrants inside an abandoned truck.
To prevent people from entering the country illegally, the Bulgarian government erected a barbed wire fence along its 259-kilometre border with Turkey. But foreigners fleeing poverty or conflict in their home countries find their way in with the help of local people traffickers.
While deaths at sea of refugees and asylum seekers bound for Europe are more common, the grim discovery in Bulgaria is not the first time groups of migrants have been found dead in abandoned vehicles.
In October 2019, British police found the bodies of 39 people inside a refrigerated container that had been transported to England. Police said all the victims, whose ages ranged from 15 to 44, came from impoverished villages in Vietnam and were believed to have paid smugglers to take them on a risky journey to a better life abroad.
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Police said they died from a combination of lack of oxygen and overheating in an enclosed space. The truck discovered in the town of Grays, east London, had arrived in England on a ferry from Zeebrugge in Belgium.
Another similar tragedy occurred in August 2015, when 71 migrants suffocated to death in the back of a refrigerated truck found on a highway in Austria.
A court in Hungary convicted an Afghan man and three Bulgarian accomplices in 2018 of being part of a criminal organization and committing multiple crimes, including human trafficking and murder, in connection with the deaths.
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Ten other defendants, mostly Bulgarians, were sentenced to prison terms of between three and 12 years.
