On 23 October 2019, the bodies of 39 people – 31 men and eight women, all Vietnamese nationals – were found in the trailer of an articulated refrigerator lorry in Grays, Essex, United Kingdom. The trailer had been shipped from the port of Zeebrugge, Belgium, to Purfleet, Essex, UK, and the lorry cab and its driver are believed to have originated from Northern Ireland. Investigations involving the national authorities of the UK, Belgium, Ireland and Vietnam have been led by Essex Police.
Eleven people were convicted of crimes related to the incident in the UK and a further 19 were jailed in Belgium.
Lorry
The lorry cab, a Scania R620, was registered in Bulgaria in 2017 in the name of a company owned by an Irish citizen, but had not returned there since, according to the Bulgarian foreign ministry. The refrigerated trailer was leased on 15 October from a rental company in County Monaghan, Republic of Ireland. Refrigerated trailers can be kept airtight and frozen to preserve perishables, which could lead to an occupant dying of suffocation or hypothermia should they become trapped inside.
The lorry cab and the trailer arrived separately in Purfleet, Essex, from where they travelled together the short distance to Grays. Police believe that the cab was driven from Northern Ireland on 19 October. It then travelled through the Republic of Ireland to Dublin, and from there by sea to Holyhead in Wales, from where it was driven to Purfleet. The trailer was loaded onto the freight ferry Clementine in Zeebrugge in Belgium. GPS data showed it had previously travelled to Dunkirk and Lille in France and Bruges in Belgium. It arrived in Purfleet, a town with a port on the Thames, at around 00:30 on 23 October and was picked up with the cab there about half-an-hour later.
The Zeebrugge port chairman said it was "highly unlikely" the migrants entered the trailer there, and that breaking the seal, loading 39 people and resealing the trailer without being noticed would be "virtually impossible".
Incident
Essex lorry deaths (Essex)
On 23 October 2019, shortly after 01:40 BST, staff of the East of England Ambulance Service responded to a 999 call made by the driver, Maurice Robinson, who found 39 bodies in a refrigerated articulated lorry. The lorry was in Eastern Avenue at the Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays, Essex. The ambulance service informed Essex Police, who arrived shortly afterwards.
Soon after the police arrived, Eastern Avenue was closed and not fully re-opened until 25 October. The lorry driver was a 25-year-old man from Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. He was arrested at the scene on suspicion of murder.
Fatalities
The ambulance service said that all 39 people were dead before it arrived, and attempts at resuscitation could not be made. The deceased – 31 males and eight females – included 10 teenagers; the two youngest were 15-year-old boys.
They are believed to have been either victims of human trafficking (for example, as forced labourers), migrants who paid smugglers to move them to the United Kingdom, or both. Smugglers often force migrants to work off the cost of the trip in slave-like conditions. There have been a number of incidents in which migrants to Europe died or were injured as a result of dangerous transportation methods. It is often compared to the 2000 Dover incident which 58 Chinese nationals died in similar circumstances.
On 23 November, it was reported that one of the teenagers later found dead had gone missing from an asylum centre in the Netherlands.
On 11 February 2020, Essex Police said that post-mortems gave a combination of hypoxia and hyperthermia as the provisional causes of death.
Identification
Initially the Deputy Chief Constable of Essex Police released a statement, "All are believed to be Chinese nationals". The Chinese embassy in London sent officials to assist with identification.
On 2 November, police clarified they were all Vietnamese. The family of a 26-year-old Vietnamese woman made public her last text message to her parents which she sent as she was dying; her family said they paid around £30,000 to smuggle their daughter from Vietnam to the UK.
On 3 November, Vietnamese officials provided DNA samples from people in Nghệ An Province and essential documents to help identify the deceased. By 7 November, all of the deceased had been formally identified. Names, ages and hometowns were released on 8 November; 20 were from Nghệ An Province, 10 from Hà Tĩnh, four from Hải Phòng, three from Quảng Bình and two from Thừa Thiên-Huế.
Investigation
A murder investigation was launched on the morning of the day of the discovery. The investigation was the "largest mass fatality victim identification" investigation in the history of Essex Police. The National Crime Agency suggested that organised crime might be involved. The investigation was led by Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Stoten, a Senior Investigating Officer within the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate. The lorry and bodies were moved from the scene to a secure location in Tilbury Docks, another nearby port on the Thames, to continue the investigation. Police later moved the bodies to a mortuary at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford for post-mortems to be carried out.
Taoiseach Leo Varadkar spoke in Dáil Éireann and said that Irish authorities would investigate any involvement regarding their country. The police suspected that an Irish people-smuggling ring which had been under investigation for around a year might be involved.
In the evening of 23 October, the Belgian prosecutor's office announced that they would also investigate the lorry's transit through their country. Belgian officials said the people were trapped in the trailer for at least 10 hours.
On 24 October, the Evening Standard speculated that the trailer had travelled from the Netherlands before its departure from Belgium. British police had also searched two properties in Northern Ireland.
Arrests and charges
2019
On 25 October, police arrested a man and a woman from Warrington, Cheshire, on suspicion of manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people, and another man at Stansted Airport regarding the same offences. On 27 October, it was announced that these three had been released on bail. After extended questioning, on 26 October Essex Police charged the driver they had arrested with 39 counts of manslaughter, conspiracy to traffic people, conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration and money laundering. He appeared at Chelmsford Magistrates' Court on 28 October, when the Crown Prosecution Service alleged that he was part of a "global ring" of people smugglers. He was remanded in custody, to appear at the Central Criminal Court on 25 November.
On 26 October, the Irish police said they had detained a man in his 20s at Dublin Port who was of interest to Essex Police as part of its investigation into the lorry deaths. He was charged with unrelated offences. A Belgian public prosecutor said that this was the lorry driver they had been searching for, who had been seen on CCTV ten times at Zeebrugge while dropping off the refrigerated trailer. Two days later, the prosecutor said that the lorry driver pretended that the trailer was filled with cookies and biscuits.
On 29 October, Essex Police announced that two brothers from Armagh, Northern Ireland, one of whom owned the haulage company operating the lorry cab detained at Grays, were wanted on suspicion of manslaughter and human trafficking offences related to the incident. On 20 April 2020, one of the brothers, a 40-year-old man, was arrested by Gardaí in the Republic of Ireland on a European Arrest Warrant and charged with 39 counts of manslaughter and immigration offences.
On 1 November, a man from Northern Ireland was re-arrested in the holding cells of the Criminal Courts of Justice in Dublin following the execution of a European Arrest Warrant issued in the UK. He was charged with 41 offences, including 39 of manslaughter, and extradition proceedings began in the Irish High Court. In February 2020, the man was given leave to appeal the extradition judgment.
On 4 November, Vietnamese police arrested eight suspects in the central province of Nghệ An in connection with the smuggling ring. In February 2020 five men and two women were charged in Vietnam with "organising or broking others to flee abroad or stay abroad illegally".
2020
On 29 January 2020, a man from Essex, who was the subject of a European Arrest Warrant, was detained in Frankfurt. He was returned to the UK where he was charged with 39 counts of manslaughter and conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration.
On 9 February 2020, a man was arrested in Northern Ireland on suspicion of manslaughter and facilitating unlawful immigration, and was released on bail.
On 4 March 2020, a man from Essex was charged with an immigration offence related to the deaths. The offence allegedly occurred between May 2018 and October 2019. On 16 March 2020, a man from Birmingham was charged with an immigration offence related to the incident. The man is accused of "conspiring to smuggle non-EU nationals into the UK, contrary to immigration law, between 1 May 2018 and 24 October 2019."
On 17 April 2020, a 42-year-old man from Tottenham was charged with an immigration offence related to the deaths. He was accused of "conspiracy to facilitate the commission of a breach of UK immigration law by a non-EU person". On 20 April 2020 a 40-year-old man was arrested in the Republic of Ireland in connection with the deaths. He faced 39 charges of manslaughter as well as immigration offences. On 29 April 2020 he appeared before the High Court via videolink, during which he was described as the "ringleader" of a criminal gang. His solicitor applied for bail and the prosecution opposed it. Bail was refused on 30 April.
On 26 May 2020, French and Belgian police announced the arrest of 26 people suspected of human trafficking in relation to the Essex lorry deaths. Authorities said a series of simultaneous early morning raids had taken place in both countries on 25 May 2020. The police operation was organised with a cross-border team organised by Eurojust that included Belgium, France, the UK and Ireland. Thirteen people were arrested in France.
On 15 December 2020, a Vietnamese man who was believed to have been involved in transporting 10 of the 39 migrants from a safehouse in Anderlecht was arrested in Redditch by National Crime Agency officers on a European Arrest Warrant issued by a Belgian judge.
2021
On 17 March 2021, Caolan Gormley, a 23-year-old haulier from Caledon, County Tyrone was charged with conspiracy to assist illegal immigration in connection with the deaths. On 14 April 2021, Gormley pleaded not guilty, with a trial date set for November 2023. On 30 November 2023 he was convicted and jailed for seven years.
In June 2021, Italian authorities and the National Crime Agency arrested a 27-year-old Romanian man near Milan in connection with the deaths, charging him with conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration and encouraging or assisting the commission of an offence.
On 17 June 2021, a Vietnamese man who is being sought by Belgian authorities for extradition in connection with the deaths was arrested at a supermarket petrol station in Middlesbrough. A National Crime Agency spokesman said that the individual was "suspected by the Belgian authorities of having played a key role in placing at least 10 migrants inside that lorry."
2022
In July 2022, Essex Police released an image of a man who is wanted in connection with the deaths. 48 year old Romanian national Marius Mihai Draghici is believed to be part of the conspiracy to smuggle the migrants into the UK. He was detained in Bucharest in August.
Court appearances
On 25 November 2019, Maurice Robinson pleaded guilty in the Central Criminal Court to conspiring with others to assist illegal immigration and acquiring criminal property. He was remanded in custody until 13 December when he appeared in court, via a video link from Belmarsh Prison in London where he was being held until his trial. On 8 April 2020, he pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of the 39 victims.
A second man, from County Armagh, also appeared at the Central Criminal Court on 13 December and pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit human trafficking offences between 1 May 2018 and 24 October 2019, by arranging or facilitating the travel of other people with a view to exploitation. He also denied conspiring to assist unlawful immigration over the same period, but did not enter any plea regarding 39 charges of manslaughter with which he was charged.