Human traffickers jailed in Hungary over suffocation of 71 migrants in 2015

Four human traffickers have been sentenced to 25 years each in a Hungarian prison for their roles in a 2015 incident in which 71 migrants suffocated to death in a truck. A court, in the southern Hungarian city of Kecskemet, on Thursday heard that the the migrants were found in the back of a refrigerated truck on a highway in Austria. The principal defendant, an Afghan man, and three Bulgarian accomplices, were found guilty of being part of a criminal organization and committing multiple crimes, including human smuggling and murder, AP reports. Ten other defendants, mostly Bulgarians, were given prison terms ranging between three and 12 years. Three of the men convicted are fugitives. Fifty-nine men, eight women and four children from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan suffocated in the back of a truck with Hungarian number plates. The truck was found abandoned in the emergency lane of a highway near Parndorf, Austria, near the Hungarian border, on August 27, 2015. The migrants had boarded that truck near the village of Morahalom, at Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, before heading towards Austria.