It was dark inside the container, and they tripped over dead bodies as they tried to claw their way to the doors that were locked from the outside. They banged on the doors, but no one came.

There were 60 Chinese people, 56 men and four women - perhaps fleeing persecution or maybe looking for a better life - crammed into the container between crates of tomatoes when the lorry left the Belgian port of Zeebrugge on board the poignantly named European Pathway ferry. When it arrived at Dover 4 1/2 hours later, there were only two people left alive, barely.

Even as the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, vowed to stamp out the "profoundly evil" trade in human-trafficking that had encouraged the men and women to pay up to £20,000 for a new life in England, the horror of what happened inside that container on June 18th was slowly unfolding. Through interpreters, the two men who had survived the terrifying ordeal explained how the air inside the container slowly ran out.

"They said they banged on the doors and shouted at the top of their voices, but eventually they had to give up through weakness," the interpreter softly explained. "They had no idea how many of the people with them had died until they got to the hospital."

That was three months ago when the British press was full of politicians muttering ominously about "bogus" asylum-seekers, and some residents in Dover did not mourn the loss of 58 people, but instead, feeling besieged by the numbers of illegal immigrants travelling to Britain, said: "Good riddance. It's 58 less for us to support."

What has happened since then? Have their families in London or China's Fujian province, where most of them came from, been able to mourn them at their funerals?

"In the course of the investigation into facilitating their entry into this country, the police lost sight of the human tragedy. They didn't separate the identification of the victims from the investigation of how they got here," says Suresh Grover, of the Southall Monitoring Group, and chairman of the National Civil Rights Movement.

Suresh has been acting as a liaison, with representatives of the Central London Law Centre, between relatives of the dead from London's Chinese community in Chinatown and Kent police, who are leading the investigation into the deaths.

"It was a crucial, strategic mistake that led people to think that they could only identify the bodies of those they thought might be their relatives provided they gave information about their own entry into Britain."

In those awful few days after the bodies were discovered by customs officers at Dover, when mothers and brothers in London and China feared the worst when their relatives hadn't turned up in England, there was a lot of confusion within the London Chinese community. At first, Kent police said that British-based relatives who came forward to identify bodies would have to provide information on their own immigration status and details of how they came to England.

The 58 frozen bodies were being held in freezers in a mortuary complex near Dover. Yet some of the relatives were themselves illegal immigrants or facing deportation or had just got on the asylum treadmill, and that was the immediate problem. Their need to identify and bury their relatives was compounded by the fear of being sent back to a life they had tried so hard to escape.

"This approach guaranteed that the relatives would not come forward," says Bobby Chan, an immigration case worker at the Central London Law Centre near Chinatown, where many of the relatives came looking for his advice.

Faced with the difficulty of identifying the bodies Kent police, the Central London Law Centre and the Southall Monitoring Group came up with a compromise. It was agreed that relatives who had some kind of immigration status in Britain, who were known in some official way to the Home Office, would come forward to identify the bodies. The police would only ask for their address.

It seemed like the solution the relatives were looking for. A handful living in London came forward and identified two of the 58 bodies, but the problems did not end there.

On each of the six occasions relatives travelled to Dover, first to identify bodies from photographs, and on separate visits to identify defrosted bodies, police officers "tried it on" and attempted to get relatives to reveal their telephone numbers and contact details, according to Bobby Chan and Suresh Grover.

"They asked for their telephone numbers and a contact and when we said `No', it took another 15 minutes of negotiation to sort it out. They always take a chance, and it makes people very worried about whether they should go down to Dover to identify bodies," says Bobby Chan.

For that reason, he says, some of the relatives are still too frightened to come forward to identify family members.

Kent police say they "understand the sensitivities" of the Chinese community and have been sympathetic towards them. They have insisted the police don't have the power to organise a general amnesty to allow people who might be living in Britain illegally to come forward to identify relatives.

"We did ask for details because we may need to get back to them. Should it be seen as insidious if we ask for details?" a Kent police spokeswoman says. But when asked if that information would be passed to the Home Office, she says: "I don't think we had an express instruction, but we couldn't give guarantees that relatives would not be named as would happen in any normal inquest."

Kent police reject the claim that officers "tried it on", asking the relatives to provide extra information, saying: "We refute any suggestion that officers have `tried it on'. We want to identify 58 people and we have provisionally identified 51 of those people. Four have been identified formally.

"Our aim has been to identify these people and we have understood the sensitivities around the issue of those living illegally in this country. The fact that 51 people have been provisionally identified speaks for itself."

Bobby Chan believes relatives living in China have identified most of the bodies, even though reports have reached him from Fujian that relatives face fines of up to £5,000 if they are identified as having family members who fled to Britain. And that it is the snakeheads - the people who organise human-trafficking - working with local government officials in China who may be falsely identifying bodies in order to put an end to the case and cover up their illegal activities.

As distressed relatives wait in London and China and the bodies of their relatives lie in freezers, Kent police officers are due to travel to Fujian next month to match DNA samples they have taken from the bodies with the DNA of family members. It is an important development, but Suresh Grover believes a general amnesty for British-based relatives would have speeded up the process so that funerals could already have taken place.

The root of the identification problem, he says, is the way in which politicians and the press have raised the issue of asylum and immigration. "They have discussed it in a retrograde way, in a punitive way," he says. "People have been described as bogus, that they don't enjoy full democratic rights and it has created a suspicion of the Chinese community who are suspicious of authority anyway. It is a classic example of institutional racism. It is unacceptable."