Austria migrant truck tragedy: relatives trying to identify their familymembers

Omar Abd-Mugeeth stared at his TV in Dubai. He felt hot, then sick. Police had found an abandoned refrigerator truck on an Austrian roadside with at least 50 dead aboard.

“ Mahmoud…my little brother. I knew he was one of them,” said Mr. Abd-Mugeeth, a 44-year-old Iraqi who last week traveled nearly 3,000 miles to try to confirm the fate of his brother and his brother’s wife.

Austrian authorities eventually extracted 71 decomposing bodies from the truck last month, one in a string of recent tragedies that has put the migration crisis at the top of Europe’s political agenda. Undertaking risky travel over land and sea has drawn global attention to the desperation of families fleeing war-torn and impoverished lands in the largest mass migration since World War II.

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth and other relatives now wait as a lab in the Austrian capital processes DNA samples to find matches with the tissue of victims who would otherwise be nearly impossible to identify. He flew Thursday to Vienna and then drove to meet with police in the Burgenland region, where the truck was found. En route, he stared past cornfields and small medieval-era houses, crying silently. “My mother,” he said, “she is crushed.”

His 29-year-old brother Mahmoud Abd-Mugeeth had married Zina Kaylany, 24, shortly after they had met at a wedding five years ago, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. It was love at first sight. “She was a very strong and respected woman,” he said. “Mahmoud adored her.” The couple lived in Baghdad, where his brother’s wife, nicknamed “Light Eyes,” sang for her husband at home.

As Mr. Abd-Mugeeth waited to speak with authorities at the Eisenstadt police station, he asked officers, “How big was the truck? How many meters?” No one could tell him exactly. On a piece of paper, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth drew a square in red ink with small circles inside.

“Seventy one,” he said. “My brother. No space.” Rising suddenly, he stood on one leg, holding his arms up. “This is how he was standing,” he said. Then Mr. Abd-Mugeeth fell back into his chair and rested his head in his hands.

His brother Mahmoud was an Iraqi army officer, a Sunni who had grown fearful that neither he nor his country could protect his wife and family from violent extremists, according to Mr. Abd-Mugeeth and other family members.

Mahmoud Abd-Mugeeth researched flights, spoke with friends who had already left and discussed possible routes with his wife, Zina, who had two brothers already living in Germany.

In mid-August, the couple decided to leave. Mahmoud Abd-Mugeeth didn’t tell his commanding officers, family members said. They flew out of Baghdad, traveling in a group that included Zina’s sister and a brother. They arrived in Izmir, a city on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast.

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said he asked his brother to stay in Turkey, where other family members lived. But his brother told him his wife and her two siblings wanted to join their brothers in Germany.

“Mahmoud would follow Zina anywhere,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. “I tried to talk him into staying in Turkey, I warned him that the trip might be dangerous, that he didn’t know what to expect, but he wouldn’t listen.” Mahmoud Abd-Mugeeth planned to start a money transfer and exchange business in Germany, his brother said, similar to the one that Mr. Abd-Mugeeth was running in Dubai.

Before leaving Izmir, the group left their passports with relatives. A smuggler recommended by friends who had already made it to central Europe told them they would get new identities. Many Iraqi migrants are told it is easier to gain asylum in European countries by changing their identities and using, for example, Syrian passports.

Mahmoud Abd-Mugeeth also left $10,000 with his older brother, who would transfer the savings when he arrived in Germany.

The group traveled by boat to Greece, where they found another smuggler who drove them by van through Macedonia and Serbia, as far as the border with Hungary. On this leg of the trip, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said, he and his mother were in constant contact with Mahmoud through calls and text messages.

‘“In the beginning, he was very happy,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said, showing a picture of his smiling brother as he posed at a town on the Greek shore.

As they progressed deeper into Europe, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said, his brother no longer smiled in photos he sent. “I could see it in his eyes,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. “He had a scared look.”

In one of the last pictures sent, he said, his brother’s face was shaded in a tree’s shadow—behind him, other migrants sat on the ground and talked while others slept amid strewed trash and discarded leftovers.

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth last spoke with his brother on Aug. 25—two days before the abandoned truck was discovered by authorities. His brother had told him he was worried about his wife sleeping on the ground in the Serbian forest, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. His brother also confided the couple hadn’t eaten for two days, except for some foraged fruit.

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said he told his brother to return to their family in Turkey, that there was no point to more suffering. But his brother refused, he said, saying he had spoken to a smuggler who had promised to retrieve them that evening at the Serbia-Hungary border and take them to Germany for €1,800 (about $2,022) a person.

“I should have been harder on him,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. “I should never have let him go.”

The group was expected in Germany by the Kaylany brothers—Ahmed, 28, and Sarmad, 25—who were waiting to welcome their sister Zina, her husband, Mahmoud Abd-Mugeeth, another sister and a brother, Ali Amer.

Mr. Amer had texted his brothers on Aug. 24, saying the group was waiting at the Serbia-Hungary border for a transport. Don’t worry, he said.

Sitting in their apartment in Aachen, a small town on the border with the Netherlands, the Kaylany brothers said Sunday that they heard nothing for a week after that message. They had tried calling. At first, the phone rang. But after awhile, even the ring tone went silent.

“The world fell apart,” said Ahmed Kaylany, sitting on a green velvet sofa, elbows resting on his knees. “It is as if God chose to take the best people in the world. They wouldn’t even have hurt an ant.”

The two brothers now spend their time waiting—for a decision by German authorities on their asylum applications, filed in May, and for a call from Austrian authorities about the DNA samples they sent out a week ago. For weeks, they have had trouble sleeping and eating.

“The wait is the worst part,” Sarmad Kaylany said, tears in his eyes. “I only think about my family, my parents back home who still have hope…My little sisters, my brother.”

Austrian investigators said working with frustrated and distraught relatives has heightened the emotional challenge for officers working on the case. “We see people doing all they can to provide us with DNA samples, some traveling across half of the world,” a police spokesman said.

Providing relatives with a clear answer is taking much longer than anyone wants, the spokesman said, and it could drag on for several more months because of the forensic complexity of the case, as well as the logistics of communicating with foreign authorities.

“Our priority has to be to not, not ever, make a mistake,” the spokesman said.

Authorities have arrested six people in the case, including the alleged driver.

. At the Eisenstadt police station, an officer arrived to speak with Mr. Abd-Mugeeth. A second man asked him to open his mouth so he could take a swab of saliva. He looked at Mr. Abd-Mugeeth’s passport and wrote down his name, birth date, and address on a form.

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth asked when he would get an answer about his DNA sample. “In two to three weeks,” the officer said.

The officer started looking through some papers in front of him, then pulled out a photograph of a head scarf from the stack.

“Have you seen this before?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said.



The officer showed him a picture of a small pouch. Mr. Abd-Mugeeth flicked through the photos his brother had sent on his phone. In one shot, of his brother and his wife in the forest in Serbia, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth saw that she wore the same pouch around her hips.

“And look,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said, pointing at his phone. “It’s the head scarf. It’s the same.”

The officer pulled out one last photo that showed a golden necklace with Kurdish letters.

“It’s Zina’s, 100%.” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. “The letters say ‘Mahmoud.’ ”

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth asked whether he could see the bodies of his brother and sister-in-law, or at least pictures of them. The officer said he couldn’t until the bodies were identified.

“You would not be able to recognize them,” the officer said. “The bodies are not visually recognizable.”

“But her hair color,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. “You must have been able to see her hair color.”

The police officer looked down at the table.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “But no, we couldn’t even recognize her hair color.”

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said he had felt as though his brother’s presence lingered after the truck’s discovery. He could see on Facebook that his brother was online for several days after they last talked, a sign his phone must have been in use. But his brother didn’t reply to messages.

When Mr. Abd-Mugeeth called, no one answered.

Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said he was convinced smugglers took away the phone—which police never found—and forced his brother and the others into the truck.

“Mahmoud was very jealous,” he said. “He would not have wanted his wife to be in a place like that with so many men and so little space. He would never have entered that truck without being very scared.”

After the couple had learned early in their marriage that they couldn’t conceive children, Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said, his brother’s wife offered a divorce so her husband could remarry and have children with someone else.

“He told her he loved her, and that he would always stay with her, with or without children,” Mr. Abd-Mugeeth said. “He said…that he would live with her and die with her. And he did.”

Wednesday 30 September 2015

http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-month-after-migrant-truck-tragedy-a-grim-wait-1443576982

continue reading

30 more human trafficking victims buried today

The remains of 30 human trafficking victims believed to be Rohingya migrants from Myanmar, found at Bukit Wang Burma, Wang Kelian last month, were buried at a cemetery in Kampung Tualang today.

Kedah Islamic Religious Department (JAIK) director Datuk Noh Dahya said 28 of the victims were men who were buried en masse in a grave, while the bodies of two women were laid to rest in an adjacent grave.

The burial started at 3.50am and ended at 5.30am, he added.

He said there were still 55 remains of human trafficking victims undergoing post mortems at the Sultanah Bahiyah Hospital, with 40 of them expected to be buried next week.

Last week, JAIK buried 21 bodies of human trafficking victims which were found in Wang Kelian.

The burial was carried out by JAIK and the National Security Council with the assistance of local villagers, the police and members of the Kedah Rohingya Welfare Association.

Monday 28 June 2015

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/malaysia/article/30-more-human-trafficking-victims-buried-today

continue reading

Unidentified Rohingya human-trafficking victims given proper burial in Malaysia

Malaysian authorities Monday gave a Muslim burial to 21 human trafficking victims, believed to be Rohingya Muslim refugees, found in shallow graves in jungles bordering Thailand.

The 21 were among 106 bodies found last month in 28 jungle camps in northern Perlis state, a remote area bordering Thailand that trafficking syndicates used as a transit point to hold migrants and refugees. Most were believed to be from Myanmar's persecuted Rohingya minority and impoverished migrants from Bangladesh.

The victims were buried in a village ceremony in neighboring Kedah state, with Islamic officials performing burial rites.

Kedah Chief Minister Mukhriz Mahathir said investigations showed the victims died of starvation and illness.

The bodies of 19 men were placed in simple wooden coffins each and buried together in a huge grave, while the bodies of two women were laid to rest in an adjacent grave, he said.

The bodies of the other victims will be buried once autopsies are completed, he said.

The discoveries in northern Malaysia followed similar revelations earlier May in Thailand, where police unearthed 36 bodies from shallow graves in seven abandoned camps on the Thai side of the border.

The discoveries have exposed hidden networks of jungle camps run by human smugglers, who have for years held countless desperate people captive while extorting ransoms from their families. Most of the victims were part of a wave of people who fled their homelands to reach countries like Malaysia, where they hoped to find work or live freely.

Human rights groups and activists say the area along the Thai-Malaysia border has been used for years to smuggle migrants and refugees, including Rohingya Muslims.

In many cases, they pay human smugglers thousands of dollars for passage, but are instead held for weeks or months while traffickers extort more money from their families. Rights groups say some have been beaten to death, and The Associated Press has documented other cases in which people have been enslaved on fishing boats.

Malaysian Deputy Home Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said at the time that investigations showed the bodies were wrapped in shrouds and their resting places marked with wooden sticks.

He said Malaysian security forces had not been patrolling the area because it was thought to be inaccessible but began surveying it after the discovery of graves in Thailand.

Monday 22 June 2015

http://www.timesunion.com/news/crime/article/Malaysia-buries-Rohingya-human-trafficking-victims-6341037.php

continue reading

Post-mortem on 22 bodies from death camps completed so far

22 bodies recovered from the abandoned migrant camps close to the Perlis-Thai border have been completed so far, police say.

Perlis police chief SAC Shafie Ismail said of the 22 bodies, 14 were between the ages of 20 and 40; 12 between the ages of 40 and 60, two aged 17 to 25; and 60 and above, one.

"Of the 22 bodies, 21 are male, but we could not determine the gender of one more body," he said. Without elaborating further, Shafie said the medical forensics team were in the midst of examining 84 other remains at the Sultanah Bahiyah Hospital in Alor Star, Kedah. In a span of three weeks, police officers retrieved a total of 106 bodies from 139 graves found on the higher contours hills on the Nakawan range.

Most of the bodies brought down were skeletal remains and highly-decomposed remains. Police will use the findings by the pathologists to ascertain if there are criminal reasons to their deaths.

On May 11, police found 28 settlements and 139 burial plots deep in the jungles of Wang Kelian. The discovery was made after two weeks of thorough combing through the 50km Malaysia-Thai border in Perlis.

Police learnt about the existence of the camps where traffickers detained large groups of migrants but could not pinpoint the exact location until the discovery of camps in Thailand early last month.

Thursday 11 June 2015

http://www.nst.com.my/node/87798

continue reading

Rohingya expert: Dozens of corpses wash to shore in Myanmar

Dozens of corpses have washed to shore in Myanmar's western state of Rakhine in the last month, an advocacy group and villagers said Wednesday. Some were believed to be Rohingya Muslims trying to escape trafficking ships, while others were Bangladeshi.

Ye Htut, the presidential spokesman, and other officials were in meetings and could not immediately be reached for comment.

Rakhine State Minister Maung Maung Ohn had no word on the bodies but his office was checking into the report.

At least 47 bodies washed up on beaches and the mouths of rivers May 12-24, many so badly decomposed they were unrecognizable, said Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, which has been monitoring activities in the isolated, northern tip of Rakhine for more than a decade.

Lewa — who provided a village-by-village breakdown and the dates each corpse was found — believes they drowned while trying to swim to shore.

Religious leader Ashu Dular and other residents in two villages contacted by The Associated Press by phone gave similar accounts, together tallying at least 18 corpses in a much less complete survey.

Myanmar has denied blame for a humanitarian crisis that has gripped Southeast Asia since early May, with more than 4,600 desperate and hungry boat people rescued in five countries after a massive, regional crackdown on human trafficking prompted some captains to abandon their human cargo at sea.

The United Nations says around half those brought to land have been Rohingya, fleeing violence and discrimination in their predominantly Buddhist country; the remainder, it says, are Bangladeshis, escaping poverty.

Myanmar, which denies the existence of the Rohingya, insists all those who have fled by boat in recent months were Bangladeshi. The government has gone to great lengths to make sure it is not disproven — at least not on its own soil.

Its Navy detained journalists, including the AP, over the weekend, erasing their camera memory cards, when they were trying to confirm the nationalities of 727 migrants on a boat hidden away for days near a remote island.

The ship was being towed Wednesday to northern Rakhine.

And late last month, Myanmar's government claimed a ship with more than 200 migrants — all Bangladeshis — had been recovered. But many more Rohingya were taken off the ship and brought to shore under the cover of darkness before they landed, said Araf, a 26-year-old woman, who was among those who said she was forced to disembark with her five children. Others in Sittwe, the state capital, had similar accounts.

For months, ships crammed with hundreds of migrants stayed in the Bay of Bengal, hoping to leave after the security crackdown eased. That didn't happen and conditions on board deteriorated, recent escapees complaining they were getting almost nothing to eat and were badly beaten if they made any noise. Some bought their freedom with help from family and friends, paying hundreds of dollars.

"In some cases, brokers started using fishing boats to bring a few people to shore," said Lewa. "But they were afraid to come too close and dropped them as near to the coast as they could."

Her team saw bodies on beaches and in the mouth of a tiny river along Rakhine's northern tip. Many were believed to be Bangladeshis, dropped off in Myanmar because they felt it was not safe to disembark in their own country during a high alert, she said.

Of the 47 bodies found, 15 corpses washed up in Alei Than Kyaw; 14 in Oo Daung River; 11 in Tha Pyay Taw; six in Tha Ya Kone and one in Myinn Hlut, the Arakan Project said.

Tuesday 9 June 2015

http://news.yahoo.com/rohingya-expert-dozens-corpses-wash-shore-myanmar-103910963.html?utm_content=buffer7fefb&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

continue reading

The 2004 Morecambe Bay cockling tragedy

Retired police chief Mick Gradwell led the probe into the 2004 cockling disaster in which 23 Chinese cocklers lost their lives. Operation Lund, as the investigation was called, was an enormously complex prosecution involving more than 1.5million pages of evidence. The trail eventually led to a Chinese gangmaster being found guilty of 21 counts of manslaughter and jailed for 14 years in March 2006. Reporter Michelle Blade spoke to Mick about the events of that fateful night and the ensuing police investigation.

Over an illustrious 30 year career, Mick Gradwell has worked on a series of high profile police investigations, including the Sophie Lancaster murder enquiry, the Haut de la Garenne child abuse investigation and the Morecambe Bay cockle pickers tragedy.

But in 2004, as senior investigating officer for Lancashire Constabulary, Mick Gradwell was thrown into the murky world of Snakehead gangs, and international people trafficking when 23 Chinese cockle pickers drowned in the bay.

Mick said: “I’m a Lancashire lad, used to dealing with crimes in Lancashire, not international organised crime gangs and human trafficking - its not what you expect, not on the landscaped shores of Morecambe bay.

“Until then I had investigated domestic murders, one punch murders, bad on bad murders.

“I was thrown into areas of the shellfish industry I didn’t know about. I didn’t know a cockle from a mussel. I didn’t know about safety issues within the industry, or Snakehead gangs.”

Mick was informed about the disaster the morning after the rescue operation.

As daylight came, eight bodies had been washed ashore - then Mick had another call saying the body count had gone up to 14.

Over time it became known that 23 people had died.

Mick said: “The crime scene was 120 square miles, there were vehicles and bodies and evidence in Morecambe, Liverpool and elsewhere.

“You get used to seeing a lot of horror and gore but seeing that many bodies who looked like they could wake up at some point was shocking.

“The investigation kicked off. We needed to find out where the cockles were going and who was organising the human trafficking.”

Police discovered how money was filtered down to 12 accounts in China from sub accounts in London.

The people who owned the accounts in China made millions.

But Fujian province, where the Chinese cocklers hailed from was one of the poorest places in the world.

Mick said: “Most of the family houses were just shacks. They are some of the poorest people in the world and they were grafting to send money back to their families.

“Most of them were farmers who were quite well qualified but had to get down in the dirt to raise money. The gangmasters tried to abuse people like that.

“One of the family members needed to go abroad to find work. They would have to pay £15-£20,000 to the Snakehead gang to get trafficked, in this case the UK. A large number of Chinese managed to illegally get into Britain, either on the back of a van or a plane.

“They would produce their passport and apply for asylum and told to come back in two weeks whilst their application was processed.

“The vast majority never went back. In 2003 cockles in the EU got the lurgy and became unfit for human consumption. The value of cockles increased greatly.

“Lin Mu Yung started the cockling enterprise which did really well.

“His English girlfriend didn’t speak Mandarin but looked after the illegal immigrants.

“They kitted the cocklers out with equipment and made sure they were looked after and safe. Lin Liang Ren was the cousin of Lin Mu Yung and was a far more nastier business manager and accountant.

“He started to cut things down and provided cheap waterproofs and bought eight year old Toyota Previa vehicles that wouldn’t get stuck in quicksand.

“There was a double tide on February 5.

“On the evening he sent 20 people out and they would two thirds fill a HGV. He would then leave the workers on the beach and return for the morning tide when they would fill up the rest of the HGV.

“When they set off from Liverpool one of the vehicles broke down and 35 people didn’t set off.

“If they had done, there would have been more deaths.

“It was the wrong end of the tide and the worst time you could have gone out cockling.

“Local cocklers were coming in and told the Chinese cocklers not to go out but because of the language differences they didn’t understand.

“A flat pick-up got stuck and was wiped out and it was quite clear he (Lin Liang Ren) had sent them out too late. By 7pm they were already goosed and it was all going wrong.
Lin Liang Ren rang his cousin and asked to be taken out of the area.

“Some of the 35 people out in the bay made their way back on foot to the car park.

“Lin Mu Yung’s girlfriend decided to ring the coastguard and kicked off the rescue.

“By this time it was way too late, 9.15pm. At 9.20pm one of the cocklers called 999 and you can hear them drowning.

“Only one guy, Li Hua, was saved at Priest Skear. He is still in witness protection.

“Lin Liang Ren never admitted anything - we had to prove it by identifying DNA, fingerprints, and using telephony analysis and forensic analysis.

“We had to seize the rent books and documents and prove he was the guy paying the money.

“We had to prove he was the guy who bought the vehicles.

“His fingerprints were on the credit card receipts used to buy equipment.

“The European cocklers said that he was the man in charge.

“There were thousands of telephone calls and the forged fishing permits had links to human trafficking.

“The trial was over six months long because he would never admit to anything.

“It was a huge investigation to send people to China to identify the deceased, and there were language differences and huge forensic accounting issues. It was a very tragic job but we had to offer justice to those who died.

“No matter what we did we were never going to bring a satisfactory conclusion to the job because all the families want is their loved one.

“It isn’t just a bit of paperwork and we do become aware of the personal tragedy and its effects.

“It was such a terrible tragedy, such a needless waste of life.”

Operation Lund won Britain’s top criminal justice award, the Justice Shield, in 2006.

The cockle pickers trial was one of the most complex ever staged in Lancashire.

Survivors who disappeared after the tragedy had to be tracked down, statements proved difficult to obtain because of language barriers and witnesses being fearful of gang reprisals and vast quantities of evidence had to be presented to the court.

New technology was introduced during the trial to provide the jury with location footage and video and audio evidence – with translations where appropriate.

In total, 23 lives were cruelly wasted in Morecambe Bay that night.

Nineteen of those who died were men, four were women, and all but one of them had children.

Two of the cocklers who were not found at the time, were later pronounced dead.

The skull of one of them, Liu Qin, was found eight years later. Their 13-year-old son was left orphaned.

The remains of Dong Xin Wu have never been found. One of the cocklers, Li Hua, made it on to a raised area of rocky sand called Priest Skear and was spotted by a helicopter crew and was picked up by the emergency services.

Li Hua was the only person to be rescued.

Chinese detectives and British police worked for three months after the tragedy to identify the victims.

They used post-mortem photographs and some of the cocklers’ meagre possessions found either on their bodies or on the foreshore. Investigating officers met with families in China and compared DNA samples from relatives.

All of the 23 people who perished were eventually named in May 2004.

When some of the cocklers’ bodies were returned to China, the Chinese government compounded the families’ grief and tried to teach them a callous lesson by getting soldiers to leave the coffins in the street. The families also had to contend with the snakehead gangleaders to whom they owed tens of thousands of pounds.

Thursday 06 February 2014

http://www.thevisitor.co.uk/news/local/slideshow-morecambe-bay-cockling-tragedy-who-were-the-victims-1-6417639

http://www.thevisitor.co.uk/news/morecambe-bay-cockling-tragedy-evil-world-of-snakehead-gangs-1-6417865

continue reading