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Dutch trucker charged as police seek identity of 58 illegal immigrants |
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June 24, 2000
LONDON (AP) - The Dutch driver of a truck in which 58 Chinese illegal immigrants died in an airtight compartment was due to appear court Friday on charges of manslaughter.
The victims, discovered when the truck arrived in the English port of Dover, were not the same group as the Chinese migrants detained and then released in Belgium in April, a British media report said. Kent county police said that fingerprints supplied by Belgian police did not match any of the victims, Sky television reported Friday.
Police on Thursday charged Perry Wacker, 32, from the Dutch city of Rotterdam, with 58 counts of manslaughter. The first person to be charged in the case, he is among five suspects being interrogated by police in England and the Netherlands.
Wacker has been held since the victims, along with two survivors, were discovered late Sunday after a five-hour sailing from Zeebrugge, Belgium.
Wacker also was charged with smuggling the two survivors into Britain and attempting to smuggle in the dead victims, police said.
The disaster prompted an international police hunt for criminal gangs who run lucrative smuggling rings, bringing to the West burgeoning numbers of illegal immigrants from Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa.
Most of the victims apparently came from China's southern Fujian province, notorious for "snake heads," the gangs responsible for the human trafficking.
Friends and relatives in Britain who may be able to identify the dead have been slow to come forward for fear of deportation.
Five illegal Chinese immigrants in Britain have told lawyers they are sure relatives were in the truck and want to get residence permits in exchange for helping identify the bodies, their attorney, Wah-Piow Tan, said.
Kent police are also holding two London-based Chinese suspected of involvement in the smuggling gang. In the Netherlands, police have arrested the 24-year-old owner of the trucking company, and an unidentified 55-year-old man.
British newspapers quoted Dutch media reports as saying the 55-year-old is Wacker's father.
The Daily Mail newspaper on Friday quoted the lawyer for Arie van der Spek, the trucking company's owner, as saying his client had no knowledge of the illegal migrants and was devastated by news of the tragedy.
Van der Spek was recruited in Rotterdam last week by two men whose identities he did not know, said the lawyer, J.H. Van Meurs.
Autopsies on the victims completed Thursday showed the 54 men and four women, all in their 20s, died of respiratory failure due to asphyxiation, officials said.
Earlier, the two survivors left the hospital under police guard for a safe house.
The young men, who have started talking to police, are key to helping trace the racketeers and to identifying their dead companions.
One of the survivors, who suffered dehydration and shock, was found still breathing under the bodies of his compatriots, said a police source cited by The Times newspaper.
In Beijing, the Chinese Foreign Ministry charged that Western countries encouraged racketeers by granting political asylum, but also pledged to crack down on snake heads.
"Certain countries should learn from this tragedy," spokesman Zhu Bangzao added.
Prime Minister Tony Blair met Chinese Vice Premier Wen Jiabao, who was on a routine visit to Britain, and urged better British-Chinese cooperation, aides said. Blair made no comment on Zhu's snipe about asylum.
In Brussels, Belgian Interior Minister Antoine Duquesne told lawmakers that police did not check the truck at all before it left Zeebrugge. He said the four policeman on duty had been called away to handle English soccer hooligans, but in any case would only have checked the paperwork.
Their grief-stricken wails filling the two-room brick house, a dozen women mourn a relative who was trying to have herself smuggled into Britain this week.
With no word on her fate, her family assumes the worst - that the woman in her 20s was among 58 Chinese found dead in a truck at the English Channel port of Dover.
Many of the dead left relatives in Changle, a southeastern Chinese city surrounded by farmland and known as a hub for migrant smuggling. Authorities have added to their distress by flooding the area with police and launching a dragnet for migrant families.
Police worked through the night Tuesday questioning families in villages around Changle, but none admitted losing a son or daughter in Britain, said an official contacted by phone at the city management office.
"It's very difficult," said the official, who would not give his name. "A lot of families don't want to admit they had people on that trip."
The heavy-handed Chinese response reflects frustration at trying to satisfy foreign pressure to stem an outflow of migrants estimated by U.S. officials at up to 100,000 a year.
China increased penalties last year for migrants, threatening them with up to a year in jail if caught. And U.S. and Australian diplomats have joined in publicity campaigns against dealing with smugglers, known as "snakeheads." Their gangs sometime hold migrants for ransom or force them into prostitution.
Undeterred, migrants pay smugglers up to dlrs 60,000, going deep into debt in hopes of finding menial work in restaurants or sweatshops. Some travel by air on false papers. Others endure weeks-long journeys by truck or cargo container.
Today's migrants are following tradition in China's densely populated southeast, which for centuries has sent people to seek their fortunes abroad. Descendants of earlier waves of emigration are the elite of Singapore and the Philippines.
Migrants appear driven as much by ambition and the promise - real or imagined - of foreign opportunity as by any economic problems at home. Changle and surrounding Fujian province are better off than some parts of China, bustling with construction and exporting fish and produce. Money sent home by migrants has financed houses and businesses - though it also whets local appetites for more.
The outflow from many Fujian villages is so steady that they are identified with the individual countries where they send migrants.
From Yanyu, they go to Germany, while from neighboring Zhanggang, the destination is Japan. Nearby towns send people to Britain, the United States and Australia.
Prices vary by destination, and people in the area say getting to Britain costs 230,000 yuan (dlrs 27,000).
"These deaths won't affect people's desire to go abroad," said a 35-year-old truck driver in Changle who would give only his family name, Chen. "The chances to send home money are tremendous. You can make a thousand to one thousand three-hundred dollars a month in Britain. You can't make that in a year here."
A heavy police presence made residents reluctant to talk to reporters. The number of extra officers in and around Changle appeared to be in the hundreds. Twenty cars from law enforcement agencies swarmed over the nearby village of Jinfeng, a close-packed gathering of ramshackle brick-and-concrete apartment blocks lining narrow, dusty streets.
In Yanyu, the home of the family mourning the female migrant was so simple and plain that it had no pictures on the walls or other decoration. Three women and a teen-age girl in worn work clothes sprawled sobbing on a bed in the front room, while others sat on a vinyl couch and rough wooden benches. The home was one of dozens separated by narrow lanes.
Minutes after a foreign reporter arrived, two police officers pushed their way into the house past the mourners and ordered him out of the town, shouting, "No interviews! No interviews!"
Six U.S. and European journalists who tried to visit towns around Changle on Thursday were detained by police for several hours and then ordered out of the county.
Officials in Changle, the Fujian provincial government and Beijing refused to release any details on the identities of the migrants found dead in the British port of Dover.
But the Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily identified one as a 24-year-old man from a village near Fuqing, a city southwest of Changle. It quoted neighbors who said he hoped to make money abroad after having suffered business losses.
The Chinese government's mixed official feelings about migrants echoed in a statement Thursday expressing sympathy over the deaths in Britain. It accused foreign governments of encouraging migrants by granting some political asylum.
"Certain countries should learn from this tragedy," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao.
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