“Help, it’s urgent,” was the first thing a BBC journalist heard when answering a call on her phone.
A call that was key to the rescue of six women who were in the back of a truck in France.
The four Vietnamese women and the two Iraqis, believed to be migrants, were trapped inside, panicking and struggling to breathe.
One of them was the one who managed to speak from inside the truck with the BBC, which later managed to alert the police.
In addition to arresting the truck driver, French authorities opened an investigation into an alleged human trafficking operation.
Around noon on Wednesday, my phone screen lit up. It was a message that said: “There are some people who have crossed the border from France to England in a refrigerated van.”
Before I could finish reading the message, a call came in.
“Are you in Europe? Please help, it’s urgent,” they spoke to me in a panicked voice.
I felt cold all over my body. The tragic story of the 39 Vietnamese immigrants found dead after suffocating in the trailer of a truck in 2019 in Essex, southeast of England, is still fresh in my memory.
I didn’t know who the caller was, but I thought he knew me from when I covered that tragedy in Essex since I had contact with many people from Vietnam on that occasion.
I asked him a few questions, but quickly became frustrated that I couldn’t get the information I needed.
What I knew was that there was a group of about six people hiding in the truck, but I didn’t know their license plate number, as well as their location and the direction they were going.
All I knew at the time, from what the caller had told me, was that the vehicle was in France, but that it appeared to have turned around and was no longer heading towards its original destination: the English border. .
They told me that the six women were in the back of the truck and that they had turned on the air conditioning. They told me that the people inside were very cold and were panicking.
But they could still contact the outside world, and the interlocutor put one of them in contact with me.
“It’s so cold, it doesn’t stop blowing air,” a young woman wrote to me from the truck, which was transporting bananas. She told me that the truck was closed with an iron bar.
He also sent me two short videos showing the scene inside.
One video showed a dark compartment, and stacked to the ceiling were cardboard boxes containing fruit, leaving only a few inches of sitting space on the floor. There was a cough, and a young female voice said in fluent English, “I can’t breathe.”
The woman told me that they had gotten into the truck around 12:30 a.m. the night before. They had spent more than 10 hours there and became concerned when location data from her phone showed that the truck had changed direction.
Without much time to think, I contacted colleagues at the BBC and journalists in France.
A journalist from the French newspaper Le Monde in London had also been contacted, and he immediately alerted his colleague in the Paris newsroom in charge of immigration issues.
Truck Tracking
The woman was able to share her live GPS location with me, from which I saw that the truck was on the E15 motorway, near Dracé, north of Lyon.
I then asked a French colleague for help in contacting the police station closest to the truck, who was able to contact them and send them the details we had.
The woman could not make calls from inside the truck. I’m not sure why, but it may have been due to the type of SIM card she was using.
We gathered all the information we needed and continually sent updates on the vehicle’s location to Pham Cao Phong, a freelance journalist in Paris, as well as the BBC team in Europe and the French police.
Suddenly, the exchange of locations was interrupted: he had lost the truck.
But the young woman was able to send me a text message. She told me that they had turned off the air conditioning and that she was having trouble breathing.
“We are suffocated,” she wrote to me.
Crammed into the narrow space I saw in the short video, I feared they wouldn’t have much time to resist.
I tried to calm them down, telling them to stay calm, try not to talk to save air, and that the police would come very quickly.
I nervously looked at the computer screen and then at my phone, waiting for news.
Intercepted by police
After talking for a while, I learned that, before getting into the truck, three of the woman’s companions decided not to go with her. I’m not sure why they made that decision, but they took a photo of the truck’s license plate.
The photo showed it had an Irish license plate, and on my phone I was able to see its location again.
French police in the Rhône region told us they had determined the location of the vehicle and intercepted it.
I texted him, but I don’t think he read my messages – the police must have come and confiscated his phone.
The four Vietnamese women say they boarded the truck with the promise that they would be taken safely to England.
As for me, I was relieved to know that they were now safe in France. “They’re safe,” I told myself, that’s the most important thing.
Around 5:00 p.m. local time, French prosecutor Laetitia Francart, from Villefranche-sur-Saône, reported that the vehicle turned out to be Lithuanian and that the driver was being investigated.
Francart confirmed that four young people were Vietnamese, one of them a minor, and the other two women came from Iraq.
What you asked me is why, after the tragedy that left 39 people dead in Essex in 2019, are there still young women from Vietnam getting on the back of a lorry to cross the border?
I can’t find any definitive answer.
*Additional information by Mattea Bubalo.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/c907p30ejngo, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-09-28 11:50:07
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