Essex lorry deaths: two found guilty over manslaughter of 39 Vietnamese people

Two people-smugglers have been found guilty of 39 counts of manslaughter for the suffocation of 39 Vietnamese people as they were being shipped in a sealed refrigeration trailer across the Channel in October last year.

Two drivers were also found guilty at the Old Bailey of conspiring to transport Vietnamese migrants from northern France to Britain. The verdicts came at the end of a trial which exposed for the first time a complex and lucrative operation which has for years illegally brought Vietnamese people into the UK.

Christopher Kennedy. Photograph: Essex police/PA

Eamonn Harrison, 23, a lorry driver from Northern Ireland, and Gheorghe Nica, 43, the coordinator of the operation, from Romania, were found guilty of manslaughter. Another Northern Irish lorry driver, Christopher Kennedy, 24, and Valentin Calota, 38, a pickup driver from Romania, were both convicted of conspiring to smuggle people into the country unlawfully.

Ronan Hughes. Photograph: Essex police/PA

Police said the two ringleaders, Nica and Ronan Hughes, 41, who pleaded guilty before the trial began, were motivated by “pure and utter greed” when they decided to ignore obvious risks and packed the container with double the normal number of people to increase their profit on an operation that netted them hundreds of thousands of pounds for every “consignment” of migrants. Each passenger paid smugglers between £10,000 and £13,000 to be brought from northern France to the UK.

The court heard how young lorry drivers from a rural area of Northern Ireland were recruited to work for Hughes, an Irish haulier, who alternated between legitimate shipments of waffles, soft drinks and wine from warehouses across Europe and illegal smuggling of alcohol, cigarettes and people. He often undercut other haulage firms to secure legitimate work so he was able to appear to be running a reputable business.

The drivers claimed in court that although they were knowingly involved in smuggling illegal items, they had no idea there were people in the containers, but the jury was unconvinced.

Most of those who died were from Nghe An and Ha Tinh provinces in north-central Vietnam, where poor job prospects, environmental disasters and the promise of financial reward abroad have fueled migration.

“I’ve never stopped thinking about my son since the tragedy happened and I still wish for a miracle to bring him home with us,” Nguyen Dinh Gia, father of Nguyen Dinh Luong, one of the victims.

“Now I don’t really care if the smugglers will face a long sentence or not,” Gia said.

“Life must go on and I hope there won’t be any such accidents happening to people seeking a better life,” Gia said.

The brother of victim Bui Thi Nhung said he no longer wanted to talk about the incident: “It’s like opening the wound over and over again,” he said.

The trial focused on four unlawful consignments of migrants brought to the UK in October 2019, the last of which ended in the deaths of the 39 people. Kennedy and Calota were not involved that night, but participated in earlier transportations along the same route.

Maurice Robinson, 26, a lorry driver who collected the trailer with the 39 migrants, who were already dead, from Purfleet docks in Essex on 22 October, also pleaded guilty to manslaughter before the trial began.

CCTV screengrab of Maurice Robinson leaving Purfleet port in Essex. Photograph: Essex Police/PA

The victims were 28 men, eight women and three children, two of them aged 15. When it became obvious there was insufficient oxygen they made desperate attempts to escape, and tried to call emergency services in Vietnam. As they began to die inside the dark container, where the temperature had risen to 38.5C, they recorded farewell messages for their relatives. They died of asphyxia and hyperthermia, or overheating.

All three drivers on trial offered the same defence: that they knew they were involved in criminal smuggling activity – and were using burner phones to communicate their plans – but they had no idea they were helping to smuggle people.

Harrison said he thought he was helping to smuggle stolen lorry parts; Kennedy said he believed he was involved in transporting untaxed cigarettes. Although Nica admitted involvement in people-smuggling on earlier occasions, he claimed he was unaware that people were involved on the night of 22 October.

The prosecution barrister, Bill Emlyn Jones, questioned whether it was plausible that the drivers could not have noticed people getting in and out of the back of their vehicles. He asked if they could have been “blissfully unaware of the smuggling of migrants as it took place literally under their noses”.

He said it would have been a “ridiculous and avoidable risk” for the ringleaders to recruit drivers who did not know what they were smuggling. “Just a look in the wing mirror would have been enough to give the game away.”

The court heard that most of the Vietnamese people who wanted to travel to the UK were given instructions via Facebook Messenger and the messaging app Viber to meet at a flat in Paris. They were then taken on a five-hour taxi ride to Bierne, a village near Dunkirk, where they hid in a barn until Harrison arrived to collect them.

Harrison said he was told to take a walk, or have a nap in his cab while the loading happened. He said he was watching Netflix while the 39 were locked inside the container.

The prosecution argued that this was unlikely, and called “witness X” – a Vietnamese passenger who was smuggled to London on 10 October 2019 in a truck owned by Hughes – to give evidence. He told the court that the lorry driver had loaded him and the other migrants into the trailer.

When the container arrived in the UK, another of Hughes’s drivers would collect it from the docks at Purfleet to take it to a container park in the grounds of nearby Collingwood Farm. Each time, Hughes and Nica arranged for a number of vehicles to be waiting to take the migrants to a flat in Dulwich, south London, believed to belong to a man called Fong, who was the key Vietnamese contact.

People would be locked inside the flat until relatives made the final £10,000 payment for successful delivery to the UK, at which point they were free to leave. Fong, who has not been traced, is believed to have shared the payments with Hughes and Nica.

Police said the lorry drivers who collected the migrants from northern France and delivered them to Zeebrugge, or collected them from Purfleet and took them to the waiting vehicles, were paid about £1,500 per passenger – making £30,000 for the average-sized consignment of 20 migrants.

Sometimes the migrants were loaded on top of other shipments. Kennedy spent a few hours with his boss, Hughes, trying to make a consignment of Mrs Crimble’s macaroons and bakewell tarts look presentable enough to be delivered to the wholesaler, after a group of about 20 migrants had travelled for nine hours sitting on them. The wholesaler rejected the biscuits because they were crushed and covered with footprints.

The court heard that double the usual number of migrants had been packed into the final October shipment because just a few days earlier, on 14 October, Harrison had collected 20 Vietnamese people from northern France but was stopped at the Eurotunnel entrance and all 20 were removed. Harrison was not fined, and was allowed to continue to the UK with an empty trailer. Anxious to secure the money, paid on arrival, Hughes decided to increase the number in the shipment on 22 October.

An expert witness told the court that even with just 15 or 20 passengers the amount of oxygen in the trailer would begin dwindling after about nine hours. Hughes was clearly conscious of the risks involved in doubling the number of migrants, and messaged Robinson to tell him to stop and give them some air as soon as he left the port in Essex. When Robinson opened the container doors it was too late: they were all dead.

Image of phone message from Hughes to Robinson about the people in the back of his lorry. Photograph: Essex Police/PA

“They were treated worse than cattle,” DCI Daniel Stoten, who led the Essex police investigation, said. “They treated them as just another commodity. It could have been drugs, it could have been alcohol. Each person had a price. It was inhumane.”

Police said Robinson, who claimed he was paid £600 a week as a lorry driver, had unexplained payments totalling £100,000 going into his bank account the year before his arrest, and drove an expensive Mercedes. Had all the smuggling runs Hughes organised in October been successful, the conspirators would have earned more than £1m.

This was the biggest investigation ever conducted by Essex police, and involved more than 1,300 people. Officers analysed 1,586 witness statements and conducted 55 interviews. As a result of the deaths, lorry drivers found with people in their trailers will no longer be let off with a fine but face immediate arrest.

• This article was amended on 22 December 2020 to remove sensitive information at the request of police.