A decision on whether to charge or release an Irish truck driver arrested in connection with the deaths of 39 migrants found in a refrigerated trailer in Britain was expected on Saturday.
A further three Irish suspects were also being detained by Essex police last night after their arrests on Friday.
Police detained a married Irish couple, both aged 38, in Warrington before dawn on Friday morning.
The couple, who are both Irish and run a haulage business and beauty salon in Warrington, have one adult child and two younger children. The husband and wife were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to traffic people and the manslaughter of the 39 victims – now thought to include both Chinese and Vietnamese nationals.
Arrest at airport
A fourth suspect, a 48-year-old man from Northern Ireland, was arrested on Friday afternoon at Stansted Airport on suspicion of conspiracy to traffic people and manslaughter.
The 25-year-old truck driver from Co Armagh was arrested at the scene of the discovery in the early hours of Wednesday morning. He was still being detained on suspicion of murder.
The trucker is believed to know the man who was detained at Stansted on Friday. The arrested driver’s truck was also previously owned by the woman arrested in Warrington on Friday.
She had registered the truck to an address in Varna, Bulgaria, but when those details emerged publicly on Thursday, she told reporters she had sold it 13 months ago to a firm in Ireland.
The trailer in which the bodies were found is owned by an Irish company which has premises in Co Monaghan and a presence in Dublin. It is not the same company that bought the truck from the woman arrested in Warrington.
The trailer company had leased the trailer earlier this month to an Irish trucking business based close to the Border. That lease was signed by a Ronan Hughes, who gave an address matching the business address for a haulier called C Hughes Transport. Mr Hughes is understood to be a relative of the company’s directors.
Efforts to contact the haulier on Friday were unsuccessful. There are no allegations of any wrongdoing against either the owner or the company which leased the trailer.
The truck driver being held in Essex picked up the trailer in the early hours of Wednesday from Purfleet port before opening it and finding the bodies.
Police initially said they believed the victims were all Chinese but a number of Vietnamese families were seeking information about their missing loved ones last night amid growing fears they were among the dead.
Relatives of one woman, 26-year-old Pham Thi Tra My, told the BBC they had not been able to contact her since she sent text messages on Tuesday night saying she was suffocating.
“I am really, really sorry, Mum and Dad, my trip to a foreign land has failed,” she wrote. “I am dying, I can’t breathe. I love you very much Mum and Dad. I am sorry, Mother.”
Her family said they had paid £30,000 for her to be smuggled into Britain.
