The Dutch driver of the lorry in which 58 Chinese illegal immigrants died of suffocation will face criminal charges, police said yesterday. They said he would be charged with manslaughter and other related offences.
The two survivors found with the 58 bodies in a sealed lorry container at Dover have been moved to a safe house for their own protection, police said yesterday.
The two young Chinese men had been under police guard at the Kent and Canterbury Hospital, in Canterbury, since Sunday night, where they were treated for severe dehydration and the mental trauma of their ordeal. A team of specially trained police officers yesterday started questioning them, and they were deemed fit by medical staff to be moved.
A Kent police spokesman said the survivors had not yet told them the identities of the deceased.
Post-mortem examinations of all of the bodies were completed yesterday, with the cause of death confirmed as respiratory failure through asphyxiation.
Kent police were continuing to question other people arrested in the county since Sunday in connection with the incident.
Two men arrested in the Netherlands were being questioned by police there, including Mr Aries van der Spek, the 24-year-old who registered the trucking company.
Meanwhile, Belgium rejected accusations of incompetence and laxity made against it by British officials. "We have nothing to be ashamed of," said the Belgian Interior Minister, Mr Antoine Duquesne.
"All we did was to apply the same general system used for a decade by the Schengen countries," he told the newspaper La Libre Belgique in an interview. He said the problem had to be solved at a European level because economic immigrants targeted all EU states alike. The Minister maintained that it was Britain, which opted out of the Schengen accord, that was lax on immigration, not Belgium.