When an Austrian police patrol discovered the abandoned truck at 11.30 on Thursday bodily fluids were leaking from the back door.
The outer truck wall, which was advertising sliced turkey, had bulges hammered from the inside where refugees, trying to get to western Europe, had died a terrible, airless death in the dark.
When the police opened the truck door on the motorway verge, they found bodies so badly decomposed that they couldn’t tell if they were dealing with 20, 40 or 50 victims.
Sometimes it takes a shocking event to transform European apathy into action. Thursday’s gruesome discovery may be that event: a Slovakian poultry truck with Hungarian licence plates abandoned by a reportedly Romanian driver.
This was no faraway sinking of a refugee-laden boat, but a white refrigeration truck in the heart of Europe, on the side of the A4 near the Hungarian border in the Burgenland region.
An hour after the find, at a hastily convened press conference, the shocked face of Austria’s national police director, Hans-Peter Doskozil, spoke volumes about the truck’s contents.
Suffocation
After standing for at least a day on the side of the motorway, he said the truck would be driven to a nearby hall to allow postmortem examinations to begin.
“It’s 31 degrees, so time is of the essence,” said Johann Fuchs, a local state prosecutor.
Local media reports suggested suffocation was the most likely cause of death and that the truck was one of 13 sold off last year by the Slovakian company advertised on the side to a Hungarian buyer.
Across the border in Hungary, the likely starting point of the truck, a spokesman for prime minister Viktor Orban said it appeared the victims were "illegal migrants in a human-trafficking operation".
Within minutes news of the gruesome find had reached Vienna, 50km away, where Austrian and German politicians had gathered to discuss the migrant crisis with leaders from western Balkan states.
Even before the discovery, Austrian and German leaders were using the Vienna conference to warn their absent EU colleagues that a handful of European countries were no longer able to shoulder the burden.
Austrian foreign minister Sebastian Kurz said, without a fair and unified EU response, Vienna was mulling "much tighter border controls".
"Austria has more migrants than Italy and Greece combined, so we shouldn't pretend that only Italy and Greece are affected," he said
In Austria, the number of asylum requests is about 30,000 so far this year, more than in all of 2014, with the final total likely to reach 80,000.
Germany is expecting 10 times that number, almost double its original estimate.
Chancellor Angela Merkel said all conference participants were "shaken" by the the deaths of people seeking safety in western Europe.
“This is a warning for us to work to resolve this problem and show solidarity,” she said.
It’s another matter whether the warning will be heard.
At yesterday’s conference, the German leader repeated that Berlin felt an obligation to help those in need, but was faced with growing problems coping with 40 per cent of all those seeking asylum in the EU.
Dr Merkel reiterated her demand for a system of refugee-processing centres on the EU’s outer r borders, particularly in Italy and Greece by year-end, and called for a “fair quota system” to resettle refugees throughout all EU member states.
“We will see then who accepts and refuses,” she said.
‘Blame game’
As the tragedy unfurled, EU foreign policy chief
Federica Mogherini
called on leaders to end “the blame game” and “take responsibility” for the refugee crisis.
A European Commission proposal from May for a compulsory refugee quota plan was awaiting member state approval, she said, while the EU executive was almost finished a common list of countries of safe origin to allow expedited asylum applications.
“We cannot continue like this, with a minute of silence every time someone dies,” said Ms Mogherini.
