The discovery of dead migrants in the back of a truck in
Austria, just a day after the Italian coast guard said 54 people lost their
lives trying to cross the Mediterranean, has highlighted once again the scale
of the migration crisis gripping Europe.
An Austrian
Interior Ministry statement said it appeared that the "many bodies"
found in the truck, whose number has not yet been confirmed, are refugees.
The truck was
abandoned on the side of the A4 highway, which links Budapest in Hungary to the
Austrian capital, Vienna, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry told CNN on
Thursday.
When police
opened the back of it, they found the bodies, Alexander Marakovits said. He
added that he wasn't able to say how many bodies were found and that police are
seeking the driver.
"These
people seem to have died a while ago. It is not clear what the cause of death
was, the investigation is ongoing," said the director of state police,
Peter Doskozil.
The truck was
left in an emergency stopping zone in the Neusiedl district of Burgenland, the
Interior Ministry said.
"This
horrible crime shows that we must get even tougher in the battle against people
smuggling," Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner said at a news
conference.
"People
smugglers are criminals and not well-minded helpers. They do not care about the
well-being of the refugees, they care about profit."
The Italian
coast guard earlier said that 54 migrants were found dead on boats in the
Mediterranean on Wednesday.
Another 3,000
men, women and children were rescued in multiple operations off the Libyan coast
Wednesday, the coast guard said. They were found on vessels ranging from rubber
dinghies to fishing boats.
Bodies found in boat's hull
A Swedish coast guard vessel, operating
on behalf of the European Union border agency, found 51 of the migrants who
lost their lives in the hull of a large fishing boat and saved 439 other people
who were on board.
It's not yet
confirmed what caused the deaths, but in the past, migrants trapped on the
lower decks of vessels have died of asphyxiation or been poisoned by the fumes
from leaking engines. The Italian coast guard initially said 50 had died.
On the same day,
the Italian coast guard found three women dead in a rubber dinghy in the
Mediterranean.
A number of
international ships working under the EU border agency, Frontex, also took part
in the rescue operations, the Italian coast guard said.
Humanitarian
group Doctors Without Borders, also known as Medecins Sans Frontieres, said its
own ships also carried out rescues.
One, the Argos,
was headed to Italy on Wednesday evening with more than 700 people on board, it
said on Twitter.
The International Organization for Migration said the number of
deaths of all migrants and refugees attempting to reach Europe by sea in 2015 stood at 2,373 as of Tuesday.
The death toll
for the whole of 2014 was 3,281, and the IOM fears that this year's total could
well surpass that, if boats carrying migrants continue to attempt the crossing
in increasingly uncertain weather
"Last year, from late August through the end of December,
over 1,200 migrants died at sea," its news release said. "IOM is
concerned that as summer turns to autumn and then winter, additional deaths at
sea could well surpass 2,000 through the final third of this year."
The so-called
central route, from North Africa to Italy and Malta, is the deadliest of three
commonly used by traffickers who cram migrants onto often unseaworthy boats in
a bid to reach European soil, the IOM said.
There have been
2,267 deaths on that route so far this year, the IOM said, with another 83 on
the eastern route -- Turkey to Greece -- and 23 more on the western route
between Africa and Spain, including the Canary Islands.
Those rescued so
far this year at sea include Eritreans, Somalis, Sudanese, Sub-Saharan
Africans, Syrians and Bangladeshis, the IOM said. While some are refugees
fleeing conflict, others are making the perilous journey in hope of finding
work.
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