- Smuggler sentenced to over 12 years for manslaughter of 39 migrants
- Conditions inside the trailer described as “unspeakable” during sentencing
- Four additional defendants imprisoned for their roles in the murders
In October 2019, Marius Mihai Draghici is sentenced for the Greys, Essex lorry trailer killings of 39 Vietnamese migrants. The court is informed that they endured “unimaginable suffering and anguish” during their final hours.
A person smuggler was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison for the 2019 manslaughter of 39 migrants discovered dead in a lorry trailer in Essex.
Marius Mihai Draghici, 50, admitted to 39 murders and conspiracy to aid illegal immigration at the Old Bailey last month.
The Romanian was described as the “right-hand man” of the human-trafficking gang responsible for the murders of the Vietnamese migrants.
After the bodies were located, he fled to Romania and was extradited to the UK in August.
In a televised Old Bailey sentencing Tuesday, Mr. Justice Garnham condemned Draghici to 12 years and seven months in prison.
He told the defendant that he was an “essential cog” in a conspiracy that made “astonishing profits from exploiting people desperate to enter the United Kingdom.”
He described the conditions inside the caravan where the victims perished as “unspeakable,” stating that “people were trapped inside the caravan with no ventilation and no way out.”
A Greys industrial estate lorry’s rear had the dead of men, women, and children in October 2019.
They perished after running out of oxygen in temperatures reaching 38.5 degrees Celsius (101 degrees Fahrenheit) in the caravan. Which was transported from Belgium to the Purfleet docks in Essex.
“Their final hours must have been filled with unfathomable agony and suffering,” prosecutor Bill Emlyn Jones KC said.
A court heard that the defendant was recruited by fellow Romanian Gheorghe Nica, who was previously tried and convicted for his role in the murders, and that the two became “completely inseparable.”
Four additional defendants were imprisoned in 2021 for their roles in the murders of the victims. Nica and Eamonn Harrison were found guilty in 2020, while truck driver Maurice Robinson and haulage company owner Ronan Hughes acknowledged to manslaughter.
In January, Hughes was ordered to pay more than £180,000 in compensation to the victims’ families.
After nearly 12 hours in an airtight unit, 15-44-year-old victims suffocated.
Hughes had employed lorry drivers in the scheme, including 28-year-old Robinson, who discovered that his human cargo had already suffocated in transit after gathering up the trailer at Purfleet.
Hughes texted Robinson before opening the back of the container to “give them air quickly” but “don’t let them out.”
Police identified at least six smuggling voyages, with migrants paying up to £13,000 for “VIP” service.
The horrifying finding ended a decades-long plan to sneak Vietnamese migrants into the UK in trucks.
