Two investigating judges on Tuesday ordered a criminal trial for 19 men indicted in the France investigation into the death of 39 Vietnamese migrants, found asphyxiated in a truck trailer in England in 2019, AFP learned Wednesday from a source close to the case confirming Le Parisien. The 19 men, now aged between 21 and 58 and six of them in pre-trial detention, are suspected of having participated in a vast network of illegal immigration from Vietnam to Europe.
Following transnational investigations, under the direction of the National Jurisdiction for the Fight against Organized Crime (JUNALCO), the investigators concluded that the 19 men - of Vietnamese, French, Chinese, Algerian or Moroccan nationality - were responsible for organizing the transport of victims, taxi drivers or owners of apartments used for the temporary accommodation of migrants in the Paris region.
"Goods"
According to telephone intercepts, these men referred to migrants as "goods" or "chickens". They will all be tried for aiding the illegal entry, movement or stay of an alien in France, committed by an organized gang, as well as for conspiracy to commit crimes, punishable by ten years' imprisonment.
Four of them will also be tried for manslaughter in manifestly deliberate breach of a particular duty of care or safety. On the other hand, the case was dismissed for the prosecution of trafficking in human beings by an organized gang, a criminal offence punishable by 20 years.
Tragedy
This tragedy, in the autumn of 2019, had thrown a harsh light on the risks of exile via clandestine channels. On the morning of 22 October, the victims boarded a trailer in northern France. The latter was then transported to the Belgian port of Zeebrugge, to cross the Channel, and was then taken over in England by another carrier.
The bodies of thirty-one men and eight women, aged between 15 and 44 and all from Vietnam, were later discovered in the trailer in an industrial estate east of London. After the tragedy, AFP spoke with families from Ha Tinh, a poor region of Vietnam from which many migrants leave. The brother of one victim said his sister, Pham Thi Tra My, 26, had sent a message on her mother's phone explaining that she could "not breathe", that she was "dying". In addition to the France, legal proceedings have been conducted in the United Kingdom, Vietnam and Belgium.