‘We can’t let this happen again’: The day police found 39 bodies in the back of a lorry

The people who had lost their lives were Vietnamese nationals – each someone’s father, mother, son or daughter (Picture: Essex Police)

As Essex police approached the lorry on Eastern Road in Grays, they were about to make a discovery no person should ever have to find: 39 lifeless bodies packed into the back of a lorry.

The people who had lost their lives were Vietnamese nationals – each someone’s father, mother, son or daughter – and had been trafficked into the UK. It was a discovery that sent shockwaves across the globe and shone a light on a horrendous trafficking epidemic that gripped Europe.

It was five years ago that Stuart Hooper got the call at 5am. As a strategic investigator at Essex Police, with experience across major cases, he was the officer in charge of overseeing the harrowing discovery on Eastern Road in Grays.

Lorry driver Maurice Robinson had phoned 999 just after 1am on 23 October 2019 to report that the trailer he’d picked up from the Port of Tilbury was full of lifeless bodies.

‘There’s loads of them – there’s immigrants in the back, but they’re all lying on the ground’, he told the police operator.

It was Ch Supt Stuart Hooper who made the shocking discovery (Credits: Al Underwood)

Ch Supt Hooper remembers: ‘It was a crisp morning and the air was cold; you could see your breath when you spoke. But when I got to the scene, it was as though time stood till. Taking in the sight of all the bodies, it hits you; the magnitude of the situation.’

It was a horrendous find for the officers first on the scene and was to be among the most traumatic moments of their career. As they peered into the open doors of the truck, there was a moment of silence as they stood in disbelief. Bodycam footage from the time shows one of them exclaim ‘Jesus Christ’, while flashing blue lights illuminated the steam emanating from the top of the truck.

PC Jack Emerson, who was one of the first to arrive, later told the court: ‘I could see numerous half-naked bodies in the back of the trailer, lying on the trailer floor motionless.’ He climbed up into the trailer to search the closely packed victims for signs of life, checking pulses and for breathing. There was none.

Speaking to Metro on the eve of the horrific event’s five year anniversary, Ch Supt Hooper explains: ‘When I arrived, my heart sank. I was just trying to process the magnitude of the death that’s in front of me. But the heroes right from the start were those young officers that responded to it.

Photo issued by Essex Police showing the inside of the trailer (Picture: PA)

‘There was no space to put your feet in the lorry, but they climbed on board in a pitch black, and went through with dignity and respect and checked to see who was alive and if they could administer first aid.’

The lorry contained the bodies of 39 people; 28 men, eight women and two 15-year-old boys. With no documents, the police were unable to identify them or notify their families. A police diagram from the time is grim; numbered figures overlap, showing where the unidentified had died.

Close-up of the scratches where some of the people trapped inside tried to batter their way out with a metal pole (Picture: PA)

The lorry, which had travelled from Zeebrugge in Belgium to the Port of Purfleet in Essex was taken to a nearby warehouse to begin the identification process. It was at first assumed that the occupants had frozen to death, but the evidence later showed something quite different.

Post mortems found that they had died by suffocation in a refrigerated truck that had no air vents. As it crossed the channel, the temperature inside the truck slowly increased, along with the carbon dioxide levels.

It was here that police officers found numerous half-naked bodies,lying on the trailer floor motionless (Picture: PA)

Analysis of the lorry’s monitoring system found that when the victims sent their final messages, the temperature had reached 38.5 degrees and marks to the interior suggested they had used a metal pole to try to punch through the roof.

The distressing find was to become one of Britain’s biggest murder investigations and a huge team of detectives and specialists were deployed. Investigators trawled through the 50 phones that were found in the trailer. Many of their final messages were sent to their families. Heartbreaking messages like ‘I can’t breathe’ and ‘I’m sorry. I cannot take care of you’ were sent to loved ones.

Lorry driver Maurice Robinson denied knowledge of people being in the trailer (Picture: PA)

Robinson, who had denied any knowledge of people being in the trailer, was arrested and taken in for questioning. After discovering his discarded burner phone and analysing his sim card, detectives linked Robinson and his boss Ronan Hughes with nine others in the UK and 18 people in France.

They had uncovered a huge, international human trafficking operation led by gang boss Gheorghe Nica. He and Hughes had arranged the collection of the migrants in France and their transport to the UK, charging around £13,000 per person. Some of the victims’ families borrowed so they could fund their loved one’s journey and are still repaying that debt.

Maurice Robinson and his boss Ronan Hughes were part of a huge, international human trafficking operation(Picture: PA)

The investigation’s breakthrough came with the discovery of a fingerprint in one of Hughes’ lorries that belonged to a Vietnamese migrant who had made the journey alive just a week earlier.

The man, known as Witness X to protect him from retaliation, gave officers a full account of being smuggled in one of Hughes’ lorries earlier that year.

A snapchat message allegedly from Ronan Hughes to Maurice Robinson (Picture: Essex Police/PA Wire)

‘The driver helped all of us to get into the back of the lorry. I could feel the lorry start to move. There was no light in the back of the lorry. There was a bucket in the corner for going to the toilet. The journey across the channel took around eight hours. Some of the people in the container went to sleep. I didn’t; I stayed awake the whole journey. It was around nine or 10am when the door of the container opened and we saw daylight for the first time.’

A makeshift shrine with the photo of victim Nguyen Dinh Tu at the home of his family in Vietnam (Picture: Linh Pham/Getty Images)

Witness X’s journey was the same as the 39 – except that he shared his with just 14 others. His testimony, alongside the analysis of CCTV, phone records and digital evidence, diligent intelligence and surveillance work alongside a number of international agencies meant that by 2020 Essex Police had enough evidence to start bringing cases to trial.

Another shrine dedicated to victim Bui Thi Nhung hoping for her safety (Photo by Linh Pham/Getty Images)

11 people were convicted for their parts in the wider conspiracy, with sentences totalling 117 years in jail. Hughes, Robinson and Nica were convicted of 39 counts of manslaughter each and were jailed for 20 years, 13 years and 27 years respectively. Eighteen people were also convicted of linked offences in France in November last year.

DCI Daniel Stoten described the gang as ‘greedy’ and ‘complacent’. ‘You wouldn’t transport animals in that way but they were quite happy to do that and put them at significant risk’, he said at the time.

Ch Supt Hooper has been to Vietnam twice to work with the victim’s families (Picture: Supplied)

Since the convictions, Ch Supt Hooper has paid tribute to the thousands of police officers, members of staff, volunteers and others whose hard work saw such a successful result, but in the years since he has tried to ensure history doesn’t repeat itself.

‘The scale of loss of human life was phenomenal and that’s the bit that always lived with me. People were used as a commodity; just like in drugs and firearms. So how do we make sure an investigation of this size and scale never happens again?’

Last year he visited to conclude the investigation with the families and thank the Vietnamese authorities for their support(Picture: Supplied)

The force has worked closely with the haulage industry and large companies around training, identifying how people might have come to hide in lorries and ensuring they have the technology to hinder human traffickers’ efforts, he explains. Alongside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office it has worked with Vietnamese authorities on education and deterrence. Essex Police has also overhauled the investigation model for police forces investigating people smuggling and worked with the industry to change designs of refrigerated lorries to include ventilation.

All 39 victims: two were just 15-years-old (Picture: Essex Police)

Ch Supt Hooper has been to Vietnam twice to work with the families, most recently to return the victims belongings to their loved ones, and he was moved deeply when he listened to the despairing messages left on family members’ phones from inside the lorry.

‘That’s something that will live with me forever. Listening to their last messages as they say goodbye to their families was hard. When you start the investigation, it’s 39 names on a piece of paper. By the time you finish, it’s 39 personal journeys and stories of families and their lives, and you feel connected.

11 people were convicted for their parts in the wider conspiracy, receiving a total of 117 years in jail (Picture: Getty)

‘When we went back this year to conclude the investigation with the families and thank the Vietnamese authorities for their support, there was a sense of closure that you could see in the families. They thanked us for the work we’d done, even in everything that they’d been through. They were grateful for the dignity and respect with which we treated family members during the investigation. Early on, our chief had signed a book of condolences and promised that we would deliver justice, and that’s what we went back to say; justice promised, justice delivered.’