Vietnamese trafficker jailed for 15 years in Belgium for UK migrant lorry deaths
- Vo Van Hong, 45, was found guilty of leading a Belgian-based people-trafficking operation linked to a lorry full of dead migrants found in England in 2019
- The victims, 31 men and eight women aged between 15 and 44, who were all Vietnamese, died from suffocation and hyperthermia in the confined space of the lorry
A Belgian court sentenced a Vietnamese man to 15 years in prison on Wednesday after convicting him of being the ringleader in the trafficking of 39 migrants found dead in a lorry.
Vo Van Hong, 45, was found guilty of leading a cross-Channel people-trafficking operation that has been linked to a lorry that was found full of corpses on an English industrial estate in October 2019.
He was also fined 920,000 euros (US$1 million dollars) and had close to 2.3 million euros confiscated, Belga wrote.
Seventeen others of unnamed nationality were sentenced in the same trial at the Bruges Criminal Court to between one and 10 years, while five defendants were cleared.
At least 15 of the 39 dead had passed through the Belgian-based trafficking network, which operated two safe houses in the Anderlecht district of Brussels for migrants heading to Britain.