Austrian and Hungarian police question suspects over Austrian refugee deaths

Austrian and Hungarian police have stepped up their crossborder manhunt following the arrest of four men linked to an abandoned truck inside which 59 men, eight women and four children – the youngest a baby girl – were found dead on Thursday.

Austrian police said the bodies' advanced state of decomposition suggested the victims suffocated in the truck's airtight refrigeration compartment as early as Tuesday, a day before it was abandoned some 50 km outside Vienna.

"There was also a Syrian travel document found so of course our first assumption is that these people were migrants, and likely a group of Syrian migrants," said Mr Hans Peter Doskozil, a police spokesman, at a press conference. "We can rule out that they were Africans."

On Friday Hungarian police announced they had detained a total of seven men in connection with the case, including the man who reportedly purchased the truck from a Slovakian poultry products company last year.

Four men still in custody yesterday – one Afghan and three Bulgarians.

“We are fairly confident that . . . they are part of a Hungarian-Bulgarian trafficking ring,” said Mr Doskozil, adding that they were the “lowest rung” of the operation.

Some 3,000 trucks daily travel the A4 motorway where the traffickers’ truck was found on Thursday, and police say it is not possible to do anything more than spot checks.

Despite these difficulties, Austrian interior minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner praised the rapid arrests as proof of effective cross-border police co-operation. She said it was important that EU member states find legal ways for refugees to leave warzones to Europe, to tackle the problems of asylum at its root to ensure that refugees could remain in their home and show a "zero tolerance approach to trafficking."

"Austria does not plan to impose strict border controls, what we are doing are border area controls," she said. "I take a dim view of (inner EU) border controls, it's far more important to secure the outer EU border and to set up secure reception centres where we can differentiate quickly between war refugees and migrants for economic reasons."

Arrest warrant

Austrian authorities have issued a European arrest warrant for the four men being held in

Hungary

– and for other as-yet undetected figures involved in the fated transport.

The truck was discovered at 11.30am on Thursday by a passing patrol car. The officers said it was impossible to give an initial estimate of the number of victims, or their origin, because the bodies were already in an advanced state of decomposition and fluid was dripping from the truck’s loading bay.

Coroners worked through the night to identify the number of victims but have yet to deliver concrete details as to how or when death occurred.

A day after the grim discovery, the flow of refugees down the A4 motorway into Austria continues. Some 85 people were found abandoned on Friday on the verge of the same Autobahn, a popular route for human traffickers, while police in Vienna announced they had rounded up a seven-member trafficking ring.

In Germany, meanwhile, authorities in the state of Saxony engaged in a public tug of war over a planned "Welcome Festival" for refugees in the eastern town of Heidenau, near Dresden.

The town has made headlines in the last week after running street battle between neo-Nazis and police outside a temporary asylum home in a disused DIY store.

Plans by pro-asylum groups for a party with refugees were struck down by local authorities on Thursday, citing security concerns. On Friday a Dresden court lifted the assembly ban, allowing the party - and a neo-Nazi counter demonstration - to go ahead on Friday night.