SOFIA: A day after 18 Afghans were found dead in an abandoned truck outside the Bulgarian capital, police have arrested seven people, an official said on Saturday.

Bulgaria’s deadliest recorded people smuggling incident comes as the country struggles with an increase in illicit border crossings.

The truck was transporting 52 people hidden under wooden planks, and 18 died from suffocation, initial investigations showed.

Locals had alerted the police, who found the truck near the village of Lokorsko, 20km northeast of the capital Sofia.

Investigators discovered a gruesome scene with bodies scattered on the grass around the vehicle.

The group of Afghans was coming from Turkiye and headed for western Europe.

Four Bulgarians have already been detained as suspects, and three fresh arrests were announced Saturday. “I can confirm seven people have been arrested,” an interior ministry official said.

Another government official said the suspected ringleader was among those arrested.

He had earlier received a suspended jail sentence of five months for people smuggling.

The government has proposed tightening laws on people smuggling as the majority of smugglers are just fined or get suspended prison sentences.

The 34 people who were rescued on Friday were taken to hospital.

Some of them are being treated for carbon monoxide poisoning after having inhaled exhaust pipe gases as their hiding place was not well insulated, according to Spas Spaskov, a senior doctor at the Emergency Hospital Pirogov in Sofia.

“The oxygen they were getting was very limited, and they had no water, that’s why they are severely dehydrated. They did not eat for several days,” he told the Nova private TV channel.

“According to initial reports, they died from asphyxia—too many people in too small a place,” Deputy Prosecutor General Borislav Sarafov said.

“Given the number of victims, this is the deadliest incident with migrants in Bulgaria,” he added.

The health ministry said the dead included a child thought to be six or seven years old, but Sarafov said the youngest victim was a teenager.

The poor Balkan nation has also faced mounting accusations it is abusing people trying to cross over from Turkiye, with asylum seekers saying they have been pushed back, locked up, stripped and beaten.

Bulgaria has denied the allegations.

EU-member Bulgaria, which serves as a gateway into the bloc, has been trying to tighten security to stop a rising number of people seeking to cross the border.

The country has stepped up controls along the 234-kilometre barbed wire fence covering almost the entire border with Turkiye.

Border police thwarted 164,000 “irregular crossing” attempts in 2022, compared to 55,000 in 2021, interior ministry figures show.

Austria and the Netherlands in December blocked Sofia’s bid to join the Schengen border-free zone.

Three police officers died when vehicles smuggling people rammed their cars last year.

Sofia has asked the EU for two billion euros ($2.1 billion) to reinforce the border fence and improve surveillance, but Brussels has so far refused.

Published in Dawn, February 19th, 2023