Police were working yesterday to identify the bodies of 39 people found in a truck trailer in Essex, in one of the worst losses of life involving apparent people smuggling in the UK.
The latest incident evoked comparisons with others around Europe in which migrants have suffocated after hiding in trucks. The death toll was the highest in the UK in such an incident since 2000, when 58 people were found dead near Dover in the back of a truck that had arrived from the Netherlands.
British authorities were trying to piece together the movements of the trailer, which police said arrived at the port of Purfleet in Essex from Zeebrugge in Belgium in the early hours of yesterday, shortly before being picked up by a Bulgarian-registered tractor unit that had come from Northern Ireland.