Six men appeared in court in Bruges this week on charges including human trafficking and manslaughter, after eight stowaways were found dead in a container in Wexford. Denis Staunton traces the victims' final journey
It was cold, wet and dark at the motorway truck stop outside Brussels as the 13 stowaways climbed silently into a metal container loaded with brand new office furniture. But Bekim Zogaj, the 20-year-old Kosovo Albanian who led them to the container, was reassuringly methodical, identifying each passenger as they entered and checking their names off a list.
As they climbed inside, Donald Domi, Zogaj's 18-year-old assistant, gave the eight men, two women and three children 18 1.5 litre bottles of mineral water and some cheese to sustain them on their journey.
Zogaj asked Kalender Kalendergil, a 16-year-old Turk who was travelling in the container with his sister and parents, to tell him what was written on a label attached to the furniture. It said "Luton/London" and Zogaj told the group that they would be going through Dover.
When Kalender's mother, Kadriye, asked how long the journey would take, Zogay replied "about three hours", adding that there was nothing to worry about because his nephew was travelling in the container too. But as he closed the container door, Zogaj allowed himself a little joke.
"Of course, it could take 30 hours," he said with a chuckle, shutting the container door and closing with silicon gel the security seal that had been broken earlier.
For Zogaj and Domi, the night of December 3rd and 4th 2001 was much like any other. Mobile phone records presented in court this week showed that, during the previous few weeks, they spent almost every night at the truck stop, a favourite loading point for human traffickers.
Domi told the court that he had known Zogaj for about eight months but had only started working for him in the late summer of 2001. He described Zogaj as someone who always had money and who supplied him with cigarettes and introduced him to girls.
"Bekim told me, 'you're a young guy. I'll give you better money if you help me out'," Domi said.
As young, unsuccessful asylum-seekers from Kosovo, living on the wrong side of the law was an inescapable part of living in Brussels for Zogaj and Domi. Domi's lawyer, Hein Diependaele, described to the court how illegal immigrants need to tell lies to do the simplest things, such as getting a telephone.
"As an illegal, you can't study, you can't get a good job. You haven't got a chance. The air that you breathe is the air of illegality. You have no other choice," he said.
Zogaj's route to a more comfortable life came through Osgur Doganbaloglu, a 42-year-old Turk who lived in London and, according to prosecutors, was a key figure in an international human trafficking organisation.
The public prosecutor, Freddy Van Damme, described Doganbaloglu as "an illegal tour operator" who organised the smuggling of thousands of people to Britain, mainly from Turkey and the Balkans, charging his clients an average of €5,000 each.
"They paid for everything beforehand. It was like an all-inclusive tour," Van Damme said.
The prosecutor estimated that Doganbaloglu and his associates smuggled at least 200 people to Britain each month last year, netting an annual income of €12 million.
Saniye Guler, a 28-year-old mother of two from south-east Turkey, would have needed to work for almost 50 years at her €40 a month job to pay Doganbaloglu's fee. But she and her husband Karede were so determined to give their children a better future that they sold everything they owned and paid €25,000 to be smuggled to Britain.
The Gulers flew from Istanbul to Sarajevo, a journey for which no visa is required, before travelling by truck and train through Austria and Germany to Brussels, where they were taken to a hotel near the Gare du Midi used by the traffickers.
The Kalendergils also flew to Sarajevo but travelled through Switzerland to Paris, from where they took a train to Brussels.
By midnight on December 3rd, all 13 stowaways - 11 Turks, one Algerian and one Albanian - were at the hotel in Brussels and the smuggling gang went into action. The 13 were taken by taxi to the truck stop, where Zogaj and Domi were waiting next to the container.
The container had started its journey in Milan, where it was loaded with office furniture bound for Drinagh Business Park in Co Wexford. The furniture company routed most of its British and Irish deliveries through a central warehouse in Luton but this order was so urgent that it was to be sent directly to Ireland.
The container was taken by train to Cologne, where Johan Schroven, a Belgian truck driver, collected it on December 3rd to drive it to the port at Zeebrugge. Schroven, who travelled with his pet dog, stopped at the truck stop outside Brussels late that night and slept until the following morning.
Schroven told the court that neither he nor his dog heard the stowaways entering the container and that he was not aware of their presence during the trip to Zeebrugge. He also denied hearing one of the stowaways attempting to break open the door of the container. An acoustic expert said he would have expected the driver or his dog to have heard something but there is no evidence to link Schroven with the traffickers.
Prosecutors have called for the driver to be jailed, however, for neglecting to check the security seal on the container, which was broken to admit the stowaways.
The container was loaded onto the Dutch Navigator on the afternoon of December 4th and set sail for Belview Harbour, Co Waterford at 8.35 p.m. By this time, the 13 immigrants had been inside the container for more than 15 hours but it was not until the ship left Zeebrugge that the worst of their ordeal began.
Because of a force 10 gale, the ship's hold was closed, shutting out the chinks of light that came through four small apertures in the container, each measuring two inches by six. Placed next to the ship's engine, the container soon became uncomfortably hot and some of the stowaways began to remove their clothes.
As the ship continued its stormy, 54-hour voyage to Ireland, the air in the container became thick with the smell of human excrement and the cries of dying children. Those lying on the floor of the container died first, as the small supply of oxygen rose towards the roof.
Those sitting on furniture boxes near the apertures at the top of the container had the best chance of survival, although lapsing into a coma may have saved some lives by reducing the amount of oxygen being used.
By the time the ship docked at Belview Harbour, most of those inside the container were already dead. But the survivors' ordeal was not over because a mix-up at the harbour meant that the wrong container was taken to Drinagh Business Park.
The 13 stowaways remained in the container for a further 24 hours before the mistake was discovered and they finally arrived at the business park.
Karede Guler, who had sold all he owned to leave Turkey, was among the survivors but his wife and two children, aged four and nine, were dead. Kadriye Kalendergil survived too but her husband, her 16-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter died.
When news of the tragedy reached Belgium, panic broke out among the traffickers and by December 10th, Zogaj and Doganbaloglu had disappeared. They remain at large but Domi, his father Flamour, Schroven, and three men accused of driving the stowaways from the hotel in Brussels to the truck stop appeared in court in Bruges this week. The six face charges of human trafficking, manslaughter, membership of a criminal organisation and involuntary bodily harm. If convicted they face up to 12 years in jail.
Kadriye Kalendergil now lives in London, Karede Guler is in Dublin and the other three survivors are in Co Wexford. Of the four survivors living in Ireland, two are unemployed and two work as kitchen porters.
None of the survivors was in court this week but Det Garda Pat Mulcahy told the court that they were following the proceedings closely.
"They are all very much aware that the case is on and want to be involved. They would all have liked to come but they don't have any money," he said.
The court case concluded after a three-day hearing this week and the verdict is due on March 25th.