Main suspects in migrant death truck get 25 years of jail in Hungary

KECSKEMET, Hungary - A court in Kecskemet in central Hungary gave sentences of 25 years in prison for the four main human smugglers involved in the death of 71 migrants in a refrigerated truck discovered in Austria in August 2015, here on Thursday.

The 71 victims from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, including 59 men, eight women and four children, died in the concealed compartment that the smugglers had refused to open in this drama that had shaken world public opinion.

The prosecution had sought indefinite life imprisonment for three of the accused, including network leader masoor Wahoo, a 31-year-end Afghan, one of his lieutenants and the truck driver, both Bulgarians. Simple life imprisonment had been required against a third Bulgarian.

The other 10 defendants were sentenced to between 3 and 12 years of imprisonment following a trial that began in June 2017. The main accused were also expulsed from Hungary after the purge of their sentence. The main defendant for an indefinite period while the others for ten years. The four main defendants received financial fines, respectively (291,000 euros, 24,700 euros, 3,095 euros and 928 euros).

The victims, who wanted to go to Germany, had been shipped to southern Hungary, not far from the Serbian border, on Aug 26, 2015. Piled on 22 square meters, with less than 30 cubic meters of air to breathe, they had succumbed in less than three hours.

The truck was discovered the next day abandoned with its macabre loading the side of an Austrian motorway near Parndorf, on the Hungarian border.

Accused of "homicides with aggravating circumstance of particular cruelty" during this trial which started in June 2017 in Kecskemet, the main suspects implicated all assured to have not known that the passengers agonized, in spite of overwhelming evidence.

"An homicide is an homicide even if it is caused by the lack of action. The defendants could have on many occasion stopped and let air in the truck and make sure the passengers were alive, but they chose not to act. It is possible to kill with inaction as well," said the judge Janos Jadi after reading the verdict.

Earlier this week, in his plaidoyer, the prosecutor Gabor Schmidt said that it was a "frightening indifference and limitless greed" that have guided the suspects: in full wave of migration, illegal transport network, billed up to "3,500 euros" per person.

An aggravating circumstance was the fact that the suspects have repeated their inhuman action just a day after the tragedy, placing 67 migrants in a similar, closed truck with no ventilation system. They were transported to Austria and luckily they have survived by a close shot, as they had to kick the door of the truck out from the inside to get fresh air.

While all are accused of human trafficking and torture, four including the Afghan have also been charged with "homicide with particular cruelty" and face life imprisonment.

"While we know that killing the migrants was not the objective of the suspects, we also know that they knew that the victims were crying for their life, yet they did not open the door of the truck to let them breathe, and their action led to the very painful death of these people," the prosecutor underlined.

Among the aggravating causes, the prosecution listed that the smuggling was carried out continuously, to earn money, by physically and psychologically harming the victims, who had many women and children among them.

The bodies of the victims could all but one be identified. The majority of them were returned to their relatives who did not attend the trial, the others were buried in Vienna.