Dutch Truck Driver Charged in Deaths of 58 Migrants

Prosecutors on Thursday charged a Dutch truck driver with 58 counts of manslaughter in the deaths of a group of illegal Chinese immigrants who suffocated in his vehicle, police said.

Perry Wacker, the first person to be charged in the case, has been held since Sunday, when authorities found the bodies and two survivors in an airtight compartment of the truck.

Police said they made the discovery at the English Channel port of Dover, where the truck arrived after a five-hour ferry crossing from Zeebrugge, Belgium.

Autopsies completed Thursday confirmed that all of the victims were asphyxiated, officials said.

Wacker, one of five suspects who have been questioned by police in Britain and the Netherlands, was also charged with smuggling and attempted smuggling, Kent County police said. He is due to appear in court today.

Kent police are also holding two London-based Chinese suspected of being involved. In the Netherlands, police have arrested the owner of the trucking company and an unidentified man.

The Daily Mail newspaper today quoted the lawyer for Arie van der Spek, the trucking company owner, as saying his client had no knowledge of the illegal migrants.

The disaster prompted an international police hunt for smuggling rings bringing an increasing numbers of illegal immigrants to the West from Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa.

On Thursday, the two survivors left the hospital for an undisclosed location. The young men are considered key to helping trace the racketeers. Police fear that gangsters may attempt to kidnap them.

Earlier, there had been speculation that the victims were part of a group detained in Belgium in April and later released without escort. However, Britain’s Sky television reported Thursday that police fingerprinting indicated the victims were not from the same group.

Most of the victims apparently came from China’s southern Fujian province, notorious for “snake heads,” the criminal gangs responsible for human trafficking.

In New York, Pino Arlacchi, head of the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention, called the deaths “unfortunately just one event out of a very long set of similar events.”