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‘I am sure he is dead’: In Vietnam, families contemplate the perilous journey of suspected Essex truck victims
- Among the mourning are Nguyen Dinh Gia, 57, who received a call warning of his son’s death and asking for his sympathy
- Local authorities in Vietnam warn people against illegal travel to Europe in search of better earnings, telling them to go to Japan or South Korea instead
Reading Time:4 minutes
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Vietnamese dad Nguyen Dinh Gia is certain his son Luong was among the 39 migrants found dead in a refrigerated truck in Essex, England, on October 23.
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Although authorities in Britain have not yet released the victims’ identities, Gia said he received an anonymous phone call with the terrible news on Thursday night from someone who was aware of the truck’s progress.
“It is my suspicion that after seeing the bodies of all the people, with no one left alive, he called me,” said Gia, a 57-year-old resident of northern Vietnam’s rural Ha Tinh province. “After that [call], he did not contact me any more.”
While he is not sure who called him, Gia said it was a Vietnamese man and, presumably, someone affiliated with the traffickers who had loaded his son onto a truck for their ill-fated journey across the English Channel.
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“They called me and said they did not expect it, but it was an unlucky thing, and asked for my sympathy,” he added.
Halfway across the world from where Essex police are conducting the county’s largest-ever murder investigation in the aftermath of the truck’s discovery, Vietnamese families like Gia’s are struggling to find answers as to how their loved ones met their ends amid their perilous, illegal journeys westward.
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