Bulgaria Charges Three Men over Migrant Truck Deaths in Austria

Bulgaria’s prosecuting authorities said on Friday they have brought criminal charges against three Bulgarian citizens detained over the death of 71 migrants, who were found suffocated in the back of an abandoned refrigeration truck in Austria.

Metodi Georgiev, Tsvetan Tsvetanov and Kasim Hasan Saleh face charges of being part of an organized crime group, Bulgaria’s Prosecutor’s Office said on its website.

The Bulgarian prosecutors have launched the criminal proceedings against the three suspects following  meetings with the relevant Austrian authorities who presented evidence they had collected. Judicial officials if Bulgaria, Hungary and Austria will hold a joint meeting in The Hague to coordinate their further course of action.

Meanwhile, Austrian police said on Friday that the study of DNA traces found in the truck’s cabin has confirmed the involvement of five suspects - four Bulgarians and an Afghan man, all of them arrested in Hungary - in the case of the death of the 71 migrants.

Austrian investigators believe the migrants - 59 men, eight women and four children – had suffocated in the "hermetically sealed” back of the truck shortly after the group crammed inside at Serbian-Hungarian border at about 0300 GMT on August 26, an Austrian police spokesman said at a news conference in the city of Eisenstadt, according to AFP.  

The truck was found abandoned on the side of a motorway near Parndorf, near Austria’s border with Hungary, in the late morning of August 27.

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