Seven people have been detained in Bulgaria in connection with the case of 18 migrants who were suffocated to death in a locked and abandoned truck near Sofia on Friday, the interior ministry said on Saturday.
“I can confirm that seven people have been arrested,” a Bulgarian ministry source told the French news agency AFP.
According to the guardianship, the leader of the network of human traffickers is among the detainees and the man had already been sentenced to five months suspended prison sentence for human trafficking.
According to initial data from the investigation, the truck was illegally transporting 52 people hidden under wooden planks and authorities suspect they are Afghan migrants who left Turkey for Europe.
Of the group, 34 migrants were rescued and taken to hospital on Friday, and some were treated for carbon monoxide poisoning from exhaust smoke inhalation, according to an emergency doctor at Pirogov Hospital in Sofia.
“They were getting very little oxygen and had no water, so they are severely dehydrated and have not eaten for days,” the doctor said.
As one of the gateways to the European Union (EU), Bulgaria registered an increase in the number of undocumented migrants entering its territory last year, despite the presence of a barbed wire wall along its 234-kilometer border with Turkey.
About 300 migrants and refugees have died on migration routes in the Balkans since 2014, three of them this year, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Source: DN
