Four Iraqi migrants were discovered in the back of a refrigerated lorry after the driver heard noises coming from the trailer near the town of Rouen and called the authorities.
Just before midnight on Monday (November 24), French police were called to a market in Rouen, report French news portals France 3 and France Bleu. On arriving at the scene, they discovered four Iraqi migrants in the back of a refrigerated lorry.
According to reports on France 3, the Dutch driver of the lorry that left Belgium for Normandy in France and was transporting flowers heard “some noises” and decided to stop the vehicle and call the police.
Inside, the police say they discovered four male Iraqi migrants, aged between 31 and 24. According to the police, the migrants boarded the lorry when it stopped for a break by the side of a motorway.
The four men were taken into administrative detention by the police. France Bleu said they were handed over to the border police later that night.
After leaving Belgium, the lorry had travelled via the port town of Dunkirk in the north of France. Dunkirk is a popular departure spot for migrants hoping to cross the Channel towards the UK.
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Similar journeys and dangers
At the end of October, a similar discovery was made in a refrigerated lorry in the north of France.
According to regional newspaper La Voix du Nord, 11 migrants from Eritrea were discovered on board a lorry on the A26 motorway, not far from Lille, also in the north of the country. In this case, reported La Voix du Nord, the lorry had been travelling from Italy.
One of the migrants on board was discovered to be pregnant and was taken immediately to hospital for checks. The migrants were not found to be suffering from hypothermia and didn’t tell authorities exactly when they had boarded the lorry.
In that group, reported La Voix du Nord, there were two adolescents and two women on board. One of them, a 28-year-old, was five months pregnant. The rest of the group was taken to the police station to be registered.
At the end of August, police discovered a group of 13 migrants in a lorry being used to transport tins of tomatoes. The lorry’s temperature was reported to be 8 degrees Celsius and four of the migrants on board had to be hospitalized because of the effects of the cold. The others were taken into accommodation run by the organization France Terre d’Asile (France country of asylum) to check whether they had a possibility of staying on French territory.
Travelling in a refrigerated lorry can be extremely dangerous. There have been a number of cases where large groups of migrants have been discovered dead after boarding a lorry that was both refrigerated and lacking enough oxygen for them to survive the journey. Perhaps the most infamous case is that of a group of 39 Vietnamese migrants who were discovered in the back of a refrigerated lorry in Essex, UK, in 2019.
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