During the night, the Geel police receive a call from a person who explains that they are trapped with several other migrants in transit in a refrigerated truck.
Thanks to cross-checks, the police manage to locate the source of the call to the west of the city.
Around 6:15 this Sunday, the police spot a truck and its refrigerated trailer registered in Spain. With the help of firefighters, the vehicle doors were broken. Eight adults are found indoors numbed by the cold.
The driver fled
The migrants were taken to the hospital. Quickly, six of them were able to join the police station while two others remained under medical supervision for a longer period.
For the time being, the investigators have not revealed the migrants' nationality and are looking for the driver who has fled.
This affair is reminiscent of the tragedy at the end of October where 39 bodies were discovered in a refrigerated truck near London in England.
A few days later, twelve Syrian and Sudanese migrants were found hidden in a fruit and vegetable truck. Last week, twenty-three migrants, including three women, were also discovered in a refrigerated truck near the Belgian port of Zeebrugge.
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The route of migrants from Southeast Asia is often the same. In a 2017 report, France Terre d'Asile had retraced this route with migrants who often take a plane from Hanoi to Moscow on a tourist visa before joining Belgium, France and finally England in trucks.