Vienna, Oct 19 (AFP/APP):The bodies of two migrants were discovered when Austrian troops stopped and searched a minibus at the border with Hungary, with the vehicle’s driver fleeing the scene, police told AFP on Tuesday.
The suspect vehicle had crossed over from Hungary and the soldiers found around 30 migrants crammed together inside, two of whom were dead.
All the survivors were men, most of them from Syria, the Austrian APA news agency reported.
The coach’s driver was being sought.
The incident recalled a dire event in August 2015 when 71 migrants from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan suffocated in the back of an air-tight van where they had been hidden by people smugglers.
The bodies, including those of three children and a baby, were discovered in Austria but they died while still on the other side of the border.
Almost four years later, the Hungarian courts sentenced their smugglers to life imprisonment.
The emotion aroused by that tragedy triggered a brief opening of the borders to hundreds of thousands of people wishing to reach Western Europe, at the beginning of the 2015-2016 migratory wave.
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