After 39 Vietnamese trafficking victims died in UK, has anything changed? – The Guardian

The 39 Vietnamese travellers embarked on their journey to the UK full of hope. Many planned to work in Britains nail bars and restaurants; some hoped to get work as bricklayers. They told relatives they were leaving Vietnam so they could provide for a better future for their families.

Their optimism vanished sometime during the crossing from Zeebrugge to the UK on 22 October last year, as the temperature inside the container began to rise and the oxygen levels plummeted.

Some of the migrants tried to smash their way out with a metal post left inside the container. At 6.59pm one of the victims tried to call the emergency services in Vietnam, but there was no signal inside the trailer and the call did not connect.

Recordings found on the 50 phones recovered by police revealed several goodbye messages for relatives. At 7.37pm, Nguyen Tho Tuan recorded an audio file on his phone: Its Tuan. I am sorry. I cannot take care of you. I am sorry. I am sorry. I cannot breathe. I want to come back to my family. Have a good life.

A selfie taken by one passenger hours before she died shows her sweating in the extreme heat; many of the passengers stripped down to their underwear inside the freight container. They were discovered with cuts and bruises on their arms, which relatives were told arose from their desperate attempts to break down the door to the container, locked from the outside.

Forensics experts told the court that after about nine hours, the atmosphere inside the trailer would have become toxic. Temperature gauges within the sealed unit showed the temperature reaching a peak of 38.5C at around 10pm on 22 October 2019, after which it began to fall again, suggesting that that was the moment when the passengers stopped breathing.

When the lorry driver, Maurice Robinson, was instructed by his boss, the Irish haulier Ronan Hughes, to open the back doors of the lorry, shortly after he picked up the load in Purfleet, Essex, at around midnight, the passengers had been inside for more than 14 hours.

Hughes was clearly worried about the length of time they had been inside, and sent Robinson a message telling him: Give them air quickly, but dont let them out. Robinson responded with the thumbs-up emoji. The passengers were already long dead. Robinson was so horrified at what he saw inside that he couldnt bring himself to take a second look when the 999 operator asked for details of the victims. I dont really want to look in, to be honest with you.

But detectives described a calm scene within the trailer. Tran Hai Loc, 35, died lying next to his wife, Nguyen Thi Van, also 35, holding her hands. They died in a horrendous way, but I think they died with dignity and respect for each other, said the officer responsible for the identification process, DCI Martin Pasmore.

Following a lengthy trial, Eamonn Harrison, 23, a lorry driver from Northern Ireland, and Gheorghe Nica, 43, the coordinator of the operation, from Romania, were found guilty of manslaughter. Another Northern Irish lorry driver, Christopher Kennedy, 24, and Valentin Calota, 38, a pick-up driver from Romania, were both convicted of conspiring to smuggle people into the country unlawfully.

The investigation and trial has provided unprecedented insights into a smuggling route taken by thousands of Vietnamese people over the past 20 years.

The journey from Vietnam to London would have cost most of them around 30,000; some had sold their family homes or mortgaged their land to fund the trip. Others had asked their parents to take out enormous loans to pay the people smugglers.

Some of the 39 travelled first to Russia, where they worked for a while, before deciding that they would try to continue onwards to the UK, where they believed they could earn better money in the Vietnamese-run nail bars found in almost every town.

Some flew initially to Germany, Hungary or Romania, their journeys arranged by employment agents who had found them work as fruit pickers or dishwashers in restaurants. Some flew to Poland, legitimately, on student visas, with the intention of travelling on to join friends or relatives in the UK once they had saved up enough money to pay for the final leg of the journey. A trained hairdresser, Nguyen Huy Hung, 15, one of the youngest of 10 teenagers who died in the lorry, was travelling to Britain to join his parents who are already based here; he told his brother in Vietnam that the final crossing to Britain would cost 12,000.

Cao Huy Thanh, 33, paid 6,680 to travel legally to Romania to work in a chicken factory in May 2019. He later met a childhood friend who persuaded him to travel to the UK. He didnt tell his wife what he planned to do there; she told the Guardian that whenever he called home he spoke mostly to his four children, aged between one and eight, and would sing with them over the phone. On 22 October last year he called his wife to tell her he was in his way to the UK. He asked me to burn incense to pray to his deceased father and ancestor so they would bless him for his safe journey, his wife said.

The victims told their families in Vietnam that they were minimising the risks involved by paying extra to people smugglers for a VIP service, whereby the lorry driver was aware that they were in the back of vehicle (rather than the riskier method of breaking into a lorry parked in a car park near the port and stowing themselves away in the back).

DCI Daniel Stoten said that although all 39 had travelled voluntary, it was still likely that most would have been exploited. There is massive organised crime behind this. They are then placed into different bars throughout the UK. Most would have gone on to work in nail bars for less than the minimum wage, getting just a couple of pounds an hour. That is modern-day slavery, even if they were signing up to it, he said.

Relatives in Vietnam told the Guardian that their lives had been shattered by the tragedy. Pictures of Pham Thi Tram My were published around the world when her mother received a text message saying: Im sorry, Mum. My journey abroad hasnt succeeded. Mum, I love you so much! Im dying because I cant breathe.

Her father, Pham Van Thin, a security guard, said the family remained around 18,000 in debt, despite some charitable donations, because they had mortgaged both their house and their nephews land to finance Mys journey. Like many parents, he opposed her decision to make the trip, but she wanted to join cousins who had opened nail salons in Britain.

My wife and I discouraged her from going, saying she should stay home and get married. Yet she insisted and, to be honest, many people have gone without any danger. She told me its going to be the VIP package, the safer route. I thought she would go by car, by plane. I never expected she would go inside a container. If wed thought there was even 1% of danger, we wouldnt have let her go, he said. I havent stopped thinking about her. Its extremely painful.

Mimi Vu, an independent anti-trafficking and slavery expert based in Vietnam, said the smuggling of people from Vietnam to the UK continued in the months after the tragedy. The prices just went up, she said, basing her observations on interviews conducted with Vietnamese migrants in northern France earlier this year. It didnt dampen peoples enthusiasm for leaving. People tended to view this as an anomaly. They saw the people who died as just very unlucky. Smugglers marketing tactics changed and they told people they needed to pay more to guarantee the safest passage.

She had little expectation that the trial would do much to stem the continued smuggling of large numbers of people from Vietnam to the UK. Its like cutting off a fingernail, when to really address the problem we need to cut off the heads, which are sitting in Prague, Berlin, Moscow, and other European cities where the ethnic Vietnamese organised crime groups that direct the smuggling and trafficking trade are based, she said.

You have to go for the leaders at the top, and they will never be the ones to get their hands dirty.