BUDAPEST, June 20 (Xinhua) -- A court of appeals in the southern Hungarian town of Szeged meted out life sentences to all four main defendants involved in what has become known as the "migrant death truck case," official sources said here on Thursday.
In the summer of 2015, when a large migration wave hit Europe, 71 migrants suffocated in a refrigerated truck, which passed through Hungary and was discovered abandoned in Parndorf, Austria.
The 71 victims -- 59 men, eight women and four children -- came from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. They all died in the truck's compartment, which the human traffickers refused to open.
"The primary defendant, an Afghan citizen, and two Bulgarians were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole," according to the Hungarian news agency MTI. Another Bulgarian citizen was sentenced to a life imprisonment with eligibility for parole in 30 years' time at the earliest.
All of them were convicted of "homicides with aggravating circumstance of particular cruelty including minors among the victims," complicity to murder and involvement in a people smuggling ring, according to MTI.
Ten other defendants have been handed jail terms of between four and 12 years without the possibility of parole.
The decision, announced on Thursday, is final, without the possibility of further appeal.
According to the indictment, the defendants locked up 71 people in the truck, which could not be opened from the inside, in the early hours of Aug. 26, 2015. The people inside the truck suffered from crowdedness, a lack of air, rising temperature inside the vehicle and dehydration. They banged on the wall of the cabin of the driver who, under instruction from the other defendants, drove on.
Among the aggravating causes, the trial established that the trafficking had been carried out continuously for monetary gain. The victims, among them women and children, were physically and psychologically harmed.
The victims, who wanted to go to Germany, had been shipped to southern Hungary. Crammed into the 22-square-meter back of the truck, with less than 30 cubic meters of air to breathe, they succumbed in less than three hours.
All but one of the victims' bodies could be identified. Most of them were returned to their relatives who did not attend the trial, the others were buried in Vienna.
The investigation also established that all the people in the vehicle had died before it crossed the Hungary-Austria border shortly after 9 a.m. The drivers then fled and left the vehicle behind.
