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Romanian smuggler gets 12-year jail term for abandoning 106 migrants

Xinhua, December 14, 2016 Adjust font size:

A court in the southern Hungarian border town of Szeged sentenced a Romanian national identified only as V.E. to 12 years imprisonment on Tuesday for abandoning 106 people in a small locked truck a year ago, seriously endangering their lives.

The people who provided the truck and paid V.E. to transport the migrants from Serbia to the Austrian border through Hungary were not identified though they too are believed to be Romanian. An accomplice, also Romanian, identified as P.A.C., received a two-year sentence.

The incident occurred on June 25, 2015. V.E. had used the truck to transport 26 people from Serbia to Austria the previous day and was connected with P.A.C. in the Hungarian border town of Morahalom. P.A.C. was commissioned to drive a car ahead of the truck in a reconnaissance maneuver and warn V.E. of any police presence on the road.

V.E. then packed the 2.5-by-5-meter truck with at least 106 people including children and infants. The truck had a metal body and no means of ventilation.

Within six to 10 minutes the passengers experienced the first signs of asphyxiation in the closed space that was 30 to 34 degrees Celsius and started banging on the walls to get the driver's attention.

V.E. stopped the truck, still in Morahalom, failed to open the rear doors, and instead got into the car driven by P.A.C. -- who claimed he did not know there were people in the truck -- and drove off towards the Romanian border, abandoning the truck.

There was no lock release inside the truck so with a concerted effort the passengers broke through the doors, but by the time they succeeded, an unidentified number of them had lost consciousness and had to be hospitalized due to life threatening conditions.

The court said that had the passengers been unable to break down the doors, they would have died within 20 to 25 minutes from the moment the doors were closed.

V.E. appealed the verdict while P.A.C. was undecided on whether to appeal. He has three days to decide. Endit