Image of the container in Asunción, Paraguay, last Friday, October 23. Jorge Saenz / AP
Seven men boarded a train at the Serbian Sid station on the Croatian border last July, and no more was heard from them.
Almost four months later, their bodies were found in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay.
Their families later learned that the victims had entered a container with stacked fertilizer bags, with only 12 inches of clearance to the ceiling.
Hidden, they intended to reach Milan, Italy, some 900 kilometers to the west, but something went wrong.
The migrants' route ended 16,000 kilometers south of their destination, in a landlocked country.
Their names were Ahmed Belmiloudi, Said Rachir, Rachid Sanhaji and Mohamed Hadoun (of Moroccan origin);
Zugar Hamza and Sidahmed Ouherher (Algeria), and Yessa Aymen (Egypt).
They were between 20 and 40 years old, according to their relatives, because the prosecutor's forensic has not yet been able to identify them.
Nor is it possible to determine the cause of the deaths, attributed in principle to the lack of air, water and food.
On Friday morning, October 23, the owner of a fertilizer company in Asunción smelled the container of fertilizers that he had imported from Serbia and knew that something was wrong.
The police found the bodies so decomposed by the action of the fertilizers that hardly any bones and clothing remained.
They carried very few bottles of water and almost no food.
The seven deceased had met six months earlier in Serbia, from where, in search of work, they were trying to enter the European Union like many other migrants from Africa and Asia at this hotspot on the Balkan route to Western Europe.
Thousands of people wait in this area camped out in the open in the hope of crossing the border.
In Sid, the Serbian city of 15,000 inhabitants where they boarded the train, there is a border crossing to Croatia, a country that is part of the EU.
The number of migrants following the Balkan route to Western Europe peaked in 2015 when around a million people made this journey, many of them on foot.
Although European countries have tightened border controls since then, some 9,000 people, mainly from Afghanistan, Syria and Iran, are stuck in Serbia, most in critical condition.
The Serbian Asylum Protection Center warned about the situation in the city of Sid at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic: “There is not enough capacity to accommodate everyone;
many are hungry and cannot even eat ”.
And he predicted that overcrowding would increase.
The container with the seven men left Serbia on July 25, but instead of the route they expected - passing through Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, and then Slovenia to Milan - it was taken to the Croatian port of Rijeka, and from there by boat with possible stops in Egypt, Spain, Argentina and Paraguay.
It arrived in Asunción on October 19, four days before it was opened by the importer, according to the investigation by the Paraguayan Prosecutor's Office.
“They were migrants looking for a better life in Europe.
They hid in the container because if the police catch them, they torture them, ”an Algerian friend of the victims, Smail Maouchi, told the Paraguayan newspaper
ABC Color
the day after learning of the tragedy.