Three young children suffering from dehydration and close to death have been rescued from a van in Austria, crammed in with 23 other refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, police said yesterday.

The incident follows the discovery of the corpses of 71 refugees in an abandoned lorry on an Austrian highway on Thursday – victims of an unfolding tragedy as refugees and migrants fleeing conflict and poverty in Africa, Asia and the Middle East flock to Europe in unprecedented numbers this year.

The minivan was stopped in Braunau district and the 29-year-old Romanian who was driving the van, registered in Romania, was arrested.

The two girls and one boy aged 5 and 6 had been in a dire state when police stopped the van after a high-speed chase close to the town of St Peter am Hart on the border with Germany, a spokesman for Austrian police said. They are now recovering in hospital.

“The emergency doctor told us they would not have made it much longer – two, maybe three hours,” said David Furtner, police spokesman for Upper Austria province.

“The driver did not give a damn about the people in the back. We would not transport animals under these conditions on our roads in Austria.”

The children and their parents were taken to the hospital in Braunau, where they are now in a stable condition.

Meanwhile, three Bulgarians and an Afghan were arrested in Hungary in connection with the deaths of the 71 migrants found in a truck on Thursday made their first appearance in court yesterday.

The judge ordered them to be detained for one month for questioning.

Prosecutors in Kecskemet said they would request the preliminary arrest of the three Bulgarians and an Afghan at a closed-doors hearing in the central Hungarian city.

The truck with 71 dead migrants was found on Thursday in the safety lane of the main Budapest-to-Vienna motorway. The suspects were detained in Hungary later that day.

It was not clear how long the bodies had been inside the truck, which Hungarian prosecutors said set off from Kecskemet.

Austrian officials say one of the suspects owns the truck and two others apparently took turns driving.