The four main suspects involved in the gruesome deaths of 71 migrants in a truck on an Austrian highway in 2015 were jailed for 25 years Thursday, in a case that sparked international revulsion. The ruling followed a yearlong trial in Hungary, which took over the proceedings from Vienna after it emerged that the migrants had suffocated on Hungarian soil.
Prosecutors, who had asked for life terms without parole, immediately appealed the sentence after the ruling, arguing it was too lenient.
The men were allegedly members of a trafficking gang based in Budapest that smuggled more than 1,200 people into Western Europe at the height of the continent’s 2015 migrant crisis.
Ten other suspects were also found guilty over the deaths and handed prison sentences of up to 12 years by the court in the southern town of Kecskemet.
The bodies of the 59 men, eight women and four children – including a baby girl – were already in an advanced state of decomposition when they were discovered in an abandoned poultry refrigerator lorry on Aug. 27, 2017.
Investigations showed they had been dead for two days, suffocating shortly after being picked up in Hungary, then a key transit country on the Balkan migrant trail.
The ringleader, a young Afghan, and the other suspects denied knowing that the migrants were dying in the back. But evidence presented to the court indicated they had been aware of what was happening.
“The four main accused knew that inaction on their part could lead to the deaths of the victims,” Judge Janos Jadi said in Thursday’s ruling.
“It’s clear that the defendants were well-aware that these vehicles were not suited for human passengers, this is torture under the law even if the passengers were not beaten by the smugglers.”
The victims were all from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Hungarian officials said the ring was a professional network with more than 15 vehicles used to transport refugees who were trekking up from Greece along the western Balkans to Europe. The gang had smuggled more than 1,100 people from Hungary into Austria since February 2015, charging up to 1,500 euros ($1,760) a head.
In court, the defendants denied knowing that their human cargo was dying.