A motorway patrol discovered the abandoned lorry near the Hungarian border on Thursday, probably at least 24 hours after it had been parked there. The refugees appeared to have been dead in the lorry for up to two days and fluids from the decomposing bodies were seeping from its door.
A Syrian travel document was found among the victims, but more time is needed to determine whether people of other nationalities were on board, Hans Peter Doskozil, police chief for the province of Burgenland, told a news conference.
The back door of the truck was not locked but secured shut with wires. Its refrigeration system showed no signs of having been switched on and there were no vents to allow fresh air inside, Doskozil said. The victims had been wearing light summer clothes.
Of the 71 dead, 59 were men, eight were women, and four were children, including a girl estimated at one to two years old and three boys aged roughly eight to 10.
The back door was secured shut with wires and there were no vents to allow fresh air inside
Hungarian police said they had arrested four men – three Bulgarians and an Afghan – and had questioned roughly 20 people after conducting house searches.
“We expect that this is the trace that will lead us to the perpetrators,” Doskozil said, making clear that the people being held were not the ringleaders of the trafficking gang.
Authorities were transporting the bodies to different Austrian morgues. A Reuters witness saw one truck carrying around 10 bodies entering a Vienna forensics centre.
Refugees and migrants have been sweeping north through the Balkans. Thousands of Syrians, Afghans and Pakistanis have crossed from Serbia into EU-member Hungary, where authorities said more than 140,000 had been caught entering the country so far this year.
Hungary, which is part of Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone, is building a fence along its border with Serbia to contain what it calls a threat to European security, prosperity and identity.
It plans to tighten laws next week to curb migration pressure on the country. That includes using the army, if necessary, to help police near the southern border, lawmaker Gergely Gulyas of the ruling Fidesz party said.
Hungarian police said 10 Syrian migrants were injured when a van driven by a Romanian suspected of human trafficking overturned en route for Budapest.
In Greece, coastguards said they had rescued more than 1,600 migrants making their way to Greek islands near Turkey over the past three days.
Police in Sicily detained 10 people on suspicion of multiple homicide and aiding illegal immigration after 52 migrants were found suffocated in the hull of a boat this week.
The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said survivors said they had been beaten to force them into the hold, and then had to pay money to smugglers just to come out to breathe.
One of the survivors, an Iraqi orthopaedic surgeon, said he had paid €3,000 to come up on to the top deck with his wife and two-year-old son.
Last week, 49 people died in another boat’s hold after inhaling poisonous fumes, and on Wednesday 21 people are thought to have died after a dinghy with 145 on board got into difficulty, UNHCR spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.