It is one of the most poignant immigration dramas of recent years: 39 corpses found in a container in England.
On Wednesday, 23 people suspected of having taken part in this human trafficking are tried before the Bruges court.
The macabre discovery had aroused worldwide emotion and led to legal proceedings in at least four countries, notably in Belgium.
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The container had left the Belgian port of Zeebrugge for England, where the bodies were found after an overnight journey, on October 23, 2019, in the industrial area of Grays, east London. The prosecution established that
"at least fifteen"
of the 39 occupants of the container had left on October 22 from Anderlecht, a town bordering Brussels where the network of traffickers had a hideout. The victims - 31 men and eight women, aged 15 to 44 - were all from Vietnam. They died of asphyxiation and hyperthermia due to the heat and lack of oxygen in the confined space of the container.
In the Belgian part of the investigations, a crackdown was carried out on May 26, 2020, mainly in the Brussels region, targeting Vietnamese suspected of having taken part in this trafficking to varying degrees. A year and a half later, twenty-three people in total are summoned to appear before the Bruges Criminal Court. The trial, which opens at 9 a.m. (0800 GMT) on Wednesday, is scheduled to last two days. The main accused, a 45-year-old Vietnamese man, prosecuted as
"leader of a criminal organization"
, faces up to fifteen years in prison. He denies any involvement. The others are generally prosecuted for
"participating in the activities of a criminal organization"
for having been involved in this mafia specializing in illegal crossings to England.
The majority of the defendants are Vietnamese or Belgians of Vietnamese origin.
Six are of Moroccan nationality and one of them is of Armenian origin.
Total absence of scruples
This drama shed a harsh light on the risks of exile via clandestine channels, also showing the total lack of scruples of certain traffickers. Many of the victims were from a poor region in central Vietnam, where families are going into debt thousands of dollars to send one of their own to the UK in the hope of a better life. In the UK, seven men have already been sentenced in January 2021 to terms ranging from three to 27 years in prison. These are in particular the men who organized the rotations of drivers to transport the migrants. One of them, Eamonn Harrison, a Northern Irish truck driver in his twenties, was sentenced to 18 years in prison for ferrying the trailer across the mainland to Zeebrugge.He assured during his trial in London that he was unaware of the presence on board of illegals. In Vietnam, four men were sentenced in September 2020 to prison terms ranging from two and a half to seven and a half years) and three others to suspended sentences.
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The investigation in Belgium is not closed since at least two suspects have not yet been arrested, according to the federal prosecutor. Another, a Vietnamese who was a minor at the time of the facts, must be the subject of a separate procedure. In the spring of 2020, at the time of the arrests carried out jointly in Belgium and France (where there were at the time thirteen indictments), the investigators had established that this network transported daily
"several dozen"
of exiles coming from South East Asia. According to the prosecution, traffickers established in Belgium had connections in France, the Netherlands and Germany. Some defendants are said to have continued their illegal activities after the tragedy.
In the wake of the pleadings of the civil parties, the representative of the federal prosecutor's office in Bruges could deliver his indictment as early as Wednesday afternoon, before giving the floor to the defense.
The judgment should not be rendered for several weeks.
