Bulgaria: 18 immigrants died of suffocation and more than 20 survived in an abandoned truck

minimum 18 immigrants They died of asphyxiation in the truck in which they were locked and which was abandoned about 25 kilometers from Sofia, Bulgaria’s capital, according to sources from the Bulgarian Interior Ministry.

The Bulgarian police found 40 people in the car. immigrants irregulars, of which 18 died of asphyxiation, locked in a false compartment under a load of firewood.

Bulgarian media reports that twelve more immigrants were found alive near the truck.

According to some survivors, the smugglers, for unknown reasons, simply abandoned the truck and fled.

Without food for several days

The emergency medical service told bTV that the rest of the passengers in the truck had been taken to hospitals in Sofia and that fourteen of them were in critical condition.

“They have not received food for several days, they suffer from dehydration and have various wounds all over their bodies, I cannot say what caused them,” Bulgarian Health Minister Asen Medzhidiev said after visiting some of the wounded.

He also stated that they had symptoms of suffocation and hypothermia.

“We assume that the immigrants were transported from the border between Bulgaria and Turkey to the area around the city of Dragoman, in order to then cross the border with Serbia,” a source in the Ministry of Internal Affairs told EFE.

The police indicated that all migrants These are men aged 15 to 25, presumably citizens of Afghanistan.

According to the Nova TV channel, at least one person involved in the death of migrants has already been detained.

This source notes that the driver or drivers abandoned the car on a sparsely visited rural road and fled when they realized that some of the refugees had died.

Authorities are investigating whether the weight of the tree they were hiding under slipped off and crushed the people hiding under it.

Bulgariaa member of the European Union (EU) but not a member of the Schengen free movement area, is part of the route that migrants and refugees try to get through Turkey, Serbia and other Balkan countries to the wealthy countries of Western Europe.

tragic precedents

Bulgariawhose entry into the Schengen area for free movement was banned in December after a decade of waiting due to the veto of Austria and the Netherlands, tightened control over migrants during these months.

The authorities have sometimes resorted to brutal methods, according to recent AFP testimony, NGO reports and Frontex, Europe’s border surveillance agency.

Police say they prevented 164,000 arrival attempts in 2022, up from 55,000 a year earlier.

The Balkan country has asked the EU for 2 billion euros ($2.14 billion) to modernize and strengthen its existing barbed wire. Pressure from some of the bloc’s countries seems to be mounting in favor of this decision.

Migration has once again become one of the central concerns of the EU as clandestine arrivals and asylum requests have increased in 2022, pushing reception capacities to the limit in several countries.

In October 2021, 12 countries asked the EU to fund such walls to respond to the arrival of migrants through Belarus.

Friday’s tragedy Bulgaria recalls the gruesome discovery in 2019 of 39 dead Vietnamese in a refrigerated truck near London.

Austria experienced a similar drama, also in 2019. The police found an abandoned refrigerator on the highway with 71 bodies of men, women and children in a state of decomposition.

In 2000, the bodies of 58 Chinese secret migrants were found in a Dutch truck at the port of Dover in southeast England. Two people survived.

In countries such as Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland or Croatia, there have been similar cases with fewer victims.

(According to EFE and AFP)

OUR PODCASTS

Espacio Vital: Dr. Helard Manrique, endocrinologist at the Delgado-Auna Clinic, explained that cortisol is a famous stress hormone that is produced in the adrenal glands, located above the kidneys, and acts as a signal that goes to the brain and all organs. . He said that it works harmoniously at the level of the organism and is systematically rhythmic (in the brain, heart, intestines, etc.). He also pointed out that the metabolism depends on cortisol: it regulates the rhythm of the blood, as well as the sleep cycle. The specialist said that cortisol drops at night and rises in the morning. He clarified that when cortisol levels are high, Cushing’s syndrome occurs, and when cortisol levels are low, Addison’s disease occurs.

Fernando Carvallo selects information and shares his vision of national and international news. subscribe to our Las cosas newsletter, as they should be reading your daily columns.