A desperate call to a BBC journalist was the key to six migrant women, four Vietnamese and two Iraqis, being rescued alive by French police from inside a refrigerated truck when they began to have difficulty breathing. The quick reaction of the British network’s Vietnamese service reporter, Khue B. Luu, prevented the clandestine trip to reach the United Kingdom from ending in tragedy.
Last Wednesday, the journalist received a message from someone unknown saying: “There are some people who have crossed the border from France to England in a refrigerated truck.” He immediately received a call from a terrified woman: “Are you in Europe? Please help, it’s urgent.”
With the tragic story of the 39 Vietnamese immigrants found dead after suffocating in a tractor-trailer in 2019 in Essex still on his mind, Khue tried to learn more details regarding the location of the vehicle without being able to get much information from the unknown woman. Khue believes she may have his number because of his coverage of the Essex tragedy, when many Vietnamese contacted him.
All I knew was that the six women were somewhere in France in a white truck with an unknown license plate and that the refrigeration of the chamber in which they were traveling, hidden behind boxes of bananas, had been turned on and it was getting colder and colder. and they had more difficulty breathing.
The woman told him that they had gotten into the truck at midnight the previous night and after ten hours in the vehicle the location data on her phone showed that the truck had changed direction and was no longer heading to the United Kingdom as they had been promised.
The reporter contacted other BBC colleagues and journalists living in France. At the same time, a journalist from the French newspaper Le Monde in London was also informed, who immediately alerted his colleague from the Parisian editorial team specializing in immigration.
The woman shared her live GPS location with the journalist and they were able to verify that she was on the E15 motorway near the town of Drace, north of Lyon. With this information, she asked a colleague in France to help her contact the police station closest to the truck, to whom they sent the details they had.
Suddenly, the information about the location was interrupted, but the young woman was able to send a worrying text message in which she said that the air conditioning had now been turned off and that it was becoming increasingly difficult for them to breathe, so time was running out to rescue them. increasingly.
After continuing to talk with the woman, the journalist learned that before getting into the truck, some of the woman’s colleagues decided not to get in it and that they had taken a photo of the license plate number. The photo showed that she had Irish license plates.
Subsequently, police in the French Rhône region reported that they had managed to intercept the vehicle, so a tragedy had been avoided and the women, including a minor, were safe.
On Wednesday afternoon, the city prosecutor’s office in Villefranche-sur-Saone reported that the vehicle actually came from Lithuania and that the driver was under investigation.
