The number of migrants found dead in a lorry abandoned on a highway in Austria has risen to 71, in a case that sparked a cross-border hunt for suspected people-smugglers responsible for the tragedy.They were believed to be those of Syrian migrants and included a toddler and three young boys, Austrian police said yesterday. Police found the decomposing bodies inside the refrigeration lorry parked on the safety lane of the main highway connecting Vienna and Budapest, Hungary. When they opened it, there was a powerful stench of human decay and the bodies lay piled on top of each other, crammed into a small rectangular space in a sea of tangled limbs.Authorities worked all night to pull the bodies out. Autopsies will be conducted to determine how the migrants died. In Hungary, three Bulgarians and an Afghan have been detained on suspicion of involvement in this latest trafficking atrocity. As the Austrian police were making their gruesome discovery, the maritime graveyard that is the Mediterranean Sea was giving up its latest harvest of the dead. At least 200 died when their boat capsized off the Libyan port of Zuwara, many of them trapped beneath the overturned boat. Initiated in late 2013, this operation reportedly saved more than 100,000 lives last year. On Friday, news emerged of the deaths of over 100 people in two more shipwrecks off the Libyan coast; here too, desperate people fleeing violence and poverty were put aboard rickety ships in the bid to cross the Mediterranean. The mass exodus of human misery from the states of the Maghrib and the countries caught up in conflict with the rise of the Islamic State, is overwhelming some parts of Europe. At least 2,500 have died at sea this year, and Germany alone is expecting 800,000 asylum seekers in 2015. The European states are all trying to dodge and weave as the flood rises, but there is no end in sight and equally no pan-European solution on the horizon. A refugee quota system proposed by France and Germany has not found universal support. A summit of European Union (EU) leaders in June was convened to crack the problem and it ended in acrimony and division. The state without internal barriers — the EU — is today busy erecting new walls to replace those dismantled a generation ago. Hungary is erecting a razor-wire barrier along its border with Serbia. Bulgaria is building a wall between itself and Turkey. Ukraine wants to build a wall on its Russian border. And they keep coming across the sea.
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