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Belgium, where a container in which 39 people were found dead in Britain on Wednesday originated from, is a major hub for migrants and people smugglers seeking to take advantage of the proximity to Britain.
The refrigerated truck arrived in Britain on a ferry from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge and prosecutors in Belgium have opened an investigation in parallel with the British one.
But the Federal Prosecutor's Office has said there is no evidence "for the moment" that the victims began their terrible journey in Belgium.
"The investigation will determine how long they've been dead. The container may have crossed the Channel with migrants already dead on board," Fran�ois Gemenne, a migration expert, told AFP.
Whatever the case, the route taken by the container shows that Belgium, just 100 kilometres from the English coast, is now a privileged route to reach Britain.
There are currently estimated to be between 800 and 1,000 migrants on Belgian soil seeking to cross the Channel via Zeebrugge or the French ports just across the border.
This figure has remained largely unchanged since three years ago, when Belgium felt the direct fallout after the closure of an infamous camp in Calais in northern France sent 8,000 people seeking new shelter.
Many migrants, and the smugglers in their wake, moved to Belgium.
"There is a Paris-Brussels-Calais triangle where migrants move," said Mehdi Kassou, who leads a network of citizens sheltering illegal immigrants, often from the Middle East, Sudan or Eritrea.
Gemenne, a researcher at Li�ge University and Sciences Po in Paris, said police operations "determine migration routes".
- 'Sordid' -
In Belgium, police surveillance has been beefed-up at motorway car parks where trucks stop on their way to Britain and where migrants hide at night.
This has led smugglers to adapt their methods.
A network dismantled last month involving an Albanian gang organised smuggling smuggling operations from a hotel in Ghent.
But experts believe pointing the finger at smugglers is too easy and that structural solutions -- often politically difficult -- are too easily sidelined.
An EU-wide asylum reform is currently at an impasse and the so-called Dublin Regulation that continues to entrust the processing of asylum applications to the first country of entry, essentially Greece or Italy, is failing.
"We are stuck in a situation that inevitably leads people to their death or into the hands of traffickers who lead them to their death," said Kassou.
"As long as England remains an attractive destination for them, which has been the case for quite some time and will probably remain so even after Brexit, we will have migrants who will absolutely want to cross this border," Gemenne said.
And "smugglers could not give a damn about the fate of migrants", he said.
"The sordid characteristic of this trafficking is that if you lose the goods, no one makes a claim for them."
Migrant truck tragedies: precedents in Europe
Paris (AFP) Oct 24, 2019 -
The discovery of the bodies of 39 Chinese people in a refrigerated truck container in Britain echoes previous tragedies over the past few years in Europe. Here is a reminder:
- 2000: 58 dead in Dover -
On June 18, 2000, 58 bodies were discovered by customs officers in the air-tight refrigerator compartment of a Dutch truck at the southeastern English port of Dover. Two people survived.
The 54 men and four women, aged from 16 to 43, all Chinese immigrants, were being transported amid a shipment of tomatoes. The lorry had arrived from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge on a freight ferry.
In 2002, the Dutch lorry driver Perry Wacker, who had according to prosecutors closed the airless container's only air vent, leaving the migrants to suffocate, was jailed on appeal for 14 years for manslaughter and conspiracy to aid illegal immigrants.
The Turkish ringleader of the human smuggling gang, Gursel Ozcan, was sentenced by a Dutch court to 10 and a half years.
- 2015: 71 dead in Austria -
On August 27, 2015, at the peak of Europe's migration crisis, Austrian police found the decomposing bodies of 71 migrants piled in the back of an abandoned poultry refrigerator lorry.
The truck, found on a motorway near the Hungarian border, contained the bodies of 59 men, eight women, a toddler and three young boys.
Investigations revealed the migrants, fleeing conflict in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, had been picked up by traffickers the previous day in Hungary, then a key transit country on the Balkan migrant trail.
Enclosed in 14 square metres (150 square feet), with less than 30 cubic metres (1,059 cubic feet) of air to breathe, they died within less than three hours in the lorry's hermetically-sealed compartment, while still on Hungarian territory, according to coroners.
Investigators uncovered a professional trafficking ring, led by a young Afghan, Samsoor Lahoo. Like his three Bulgarian accomplices, he was sentenced on appeal to life in prison in June 2019.
The deaths provoked international revulsion and shortly afterwards German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced she would open her country's doors, eventually allowing in more than one million refugees.
Several similar, but less deadly, incidents have been recorded over the past years, notably in Ireland, Italy and the Netherlands.
In Britain in 2014, 34 Afghans were found inside a shipping container at Tilbury port suffering from severe dehydration, hypothermia and lack of air. One man died during the sea crossing from Belgium.
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