CNN
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Bulgarian prosecutors have charged six people with human trafficking after 18 Afghans have been found dead inside a truck dumped on a dust highway close to the capital Sofia on Friday.
Prosecutors stated the truck was deserted close to the village of Lokorsko after the motive force and his companion found that most of the 52 migrants in the truck have been dizzy and a few had already died. The migrants have been in hidden compartments of the truck which have been remoted with foil.
The truck driver and his companion have been additionally charged over the deaths, prosecutors stated.
Despite robust and extended banging on the cabin, the motive force refused to cease the truck earlier, the top of the National Investigative Service and deputy chief prosecutor Borislav Sarafov advised reporters.
The deaths have shocked Bulgaria, in what is among the worst incidents of its type on the overland route throughout the Balkans into Europe.
Thousands of people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and Asia make the journey and Bulgaria has been making an attempt to deal with an elevated influx of migrants from neighboring Turkey in the previous 12 months.
Since the Taliban took management of Afghanistan in August 2021, that nation has plunged into an financial and humanitarian crisis. According to a latest report from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), an estimated 28.three million – roughly two thirds of Afghanistan’s inhabitants – are in want of pressing humanitarian help to outlive. Last month, a Taliban official stated that at the least 157 people had died in the nation’s bitter winter.
The 18 victims died of a mixture of lack of oxygen in an enclosed house and issue respiration as they’d been crammed into the truck “like in a tin can,” Sarafov stated.
“The victims died slowly and painfully,” he added.
“This case shows an extreme callousness and demonstrates that migrants are seen only as goods that should be shipped from one place to another, irrespective of whether they are alive or dead,” he stated.
The different 34 migrants, who have been rushed to hospitals on Friday, stay in steady situation, officials stated.
Five of these charged are in custody, whereas one of many suspected traffickers, who had managed to flee the nation, is being sought with an European arrest warrant.
Prosecutors stated the ring had trafficked migrants from the border with Turkey throughout Bulgaria to Serbia, from the place they continued their journey primarily to Britain, Germany and France.