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Essex truck deaths: woman Pham Thi Tra My and other Vietnamese feared to be among victims after trying to enter UK via China
- Pham Thi Tra My sent text message to mother saying she could not breathe around time vehicle was en route from Belgium to Britain
- 39 victims earlier identified as being from China, but could have been Vietnamese migrants using fake Chinese passports
Reading Time:5 minutes
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Distraught Vietnamese families were seeking information about their missing loved ones last night amid growing fears that some of the 39 people who died in a refrigerated truck in Essex were from the country.
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Pham Thi Tra My, 26, sent a text message to her mother saying she could not breathe at about the time the truck was en route from Belgium to Britain, said Hoa Nghiem from Human Rights Space, a civic network based in Vietnam.
“It was told on the news that all 39 people were Chinese but Tra My’s family is trying to verify if their daughter was among them as the last dying text from her was coincidentally in time,” she wrote on Twitter.
“Our contact is getting more alerts that there could be more Vietnamese people in the truck.”
Nghiem published a screenshot of Tra My’s text message, which indicated it was sent at 4.28am Vietnam time (10.28pm in the UK) on Wednesday.
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The bodies were found in the truck container at an industrial estate near London around four hours later. It had arrived in Britain about an hour-and-a-half earlier, after being shipped from Zeebrugge in Belgium.
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