According to Europol, the EU police agency, human trafficking continues to be a major problem for international law enforcers.
There are no signs that the main transit routes and organisations responsible for smuggling tens of thousands of refugees annually into EU countries are either identified or that concrete efforts are being made to stem the flow, the agency accepts.
Europol's assistant co-ordinator, Mr Willy Bruggermans, believes that the increased mobility between EU states and the fall of the Iron Curtain were the two reasons for the increasing number of smuggling rings operating in Western Europe.
People-smuggling is lucrative - worth more than $9 billion (£7.34 billion) a year in Europe alone, it is estimated.
It is thought that those who perished on the Dutch lorry may have spent a considerable time out of their own country before their arrival in the Netherlands or in Belgium.
The country or point at which they were stowed away in the container is still unclear but there appears to be evidence to show that it happened in the Netherlands.
According to the P&O Stena Line, on whose ferry the truck travelled from Zeebrugge in Belgium to Dover, the driver arrived late for the ship departing after midnight on Sunday. He paid in cash and issued a false business address. The arrested driver is believed to be a 24-year-old Dutchman.
It was also reported yesterday that the name and address on the lorry and container may have been incorrect, as were the cargo registration numbers.
A Customs source at the port of Rotterdam last night suggested that investigators here are working on a theory that those who died were smuggled by road out of the Russian Federation, possibly via the Ukraine or the Czech Republic in recent weeks before they were herded together for their fatal last journey.
The company whose name was painted on the lorry, van Der Spek transport of Slijdrecht near Rotterdam, has said that 14 days ago notice was given regarding a truck which was to be registered in the name of their company. "But it was not yet registered in our name," a spokesman said. He said that a small company known as "Wacker Transport" was the owner of the truck.
When reporters turned up at the address given to P&O ferries by the truck driver as the official business, it turned out to be a cafe and bike shop over a twostorey terraced house in Rotterdam where nobody claimed to have ever heard of Wacker Transport.
The chairman of the largest Dutch transport organisation, Mr Karel Noordzij of Transport and Logistiek Nederland, has called for a EU-wide task force to tackle the enormous problem of human trafficking.
More than 2,000 asylum seekers have died in and around Europe since 1993 due to the continent's hardening stance on immigration, a Dutch-based migrant and refugee support group, UNITED, said.