A large number of migrants have been found dead inside a truck on a highway in Austria, police said on Thursday.
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The spokesman said he did not have an exact figure of the death toll.
The food-deliver truck was found along Austria’s A4 autobahn near the town of Parndorf, which is not far from the border with Hungary and Slovakia.
Police believe the refugees suffocated, with at least 20 people dying. He said: “Unfortunately there are many dead people in there”.
Employees of the infrastructure company Asfinag saw the lorry parked at the highway for a very long time and contacted the police, the APA said.
Austria has complained that the EU has failed to pay enough attention to migrants entering the western Balkans.
Doskozil, the police chief of Burgenland province, said the state of the bodies made it hard to say how many bodies were in the truck but estimated it could be up to 50. “A manhunt for the driver is now underway”.
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Austria’s interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, launched a manhunt for the people smugglers responsible on Thursday, commenting: “Today is a dark day”. One of the drivers had 34 people packed in the back of a truck, the Guardian reports.
