Police fear as many as 50 migrants dead inside lorry left by Austrian motorway

The bodies of at least 20 migrants – and possibly as many as 40 or 50 – have been found inside a parked lorry in eastern Austria, police said on Thursday, in a grim indication of the growing human toll of Europe’s worst refugee emergency since 1945.

The badly decomposed remains were discovered on Thursday morning on Austria’s A4 motorway between Neusiedl and Parndorf. The truck had been abandoned on the hard shoulder of the road near Parndorf. It had apparently been there since Wednesday. The refugees, who appeared to have suffocated, died before they entered Austria, police said.

Hans Peter Doskozil, head of police in the district of Burgenland, said there were at least 20 dead but that the death toll could rise to 40 or 50. The state of the bodies made establishing an exact figure difficult. The identities were also not known, he said.

“The deaths already occurred some time ago,” he added. “We can make no concrete assumptions about the origin or cause [of death]. We can assume, however, that they are refugees.”

The deaths overshadowed a meeting in Vienna of leaders from the EU and the western Balkans to discuss the European migration crisis. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said she was “shaken by the awful news”. “This reminds us that we in Europe need to tackle the problem quickly and find solutions in the spirit of solidarity,” she said.

Merkel added: “This is a warning for us to tackle the issue of migration quickly. We have more refugees in the world than at any time since the second world war. The world’s eyes are upon us.”

According to road officials on Thursday, an employee mowing the grass alerted police after noticing putrid liquid dripping from the back of the white refrigerated vehicle. Its door had been left ajar. Detectives then made the grim discovery. A manhunt for the driver is under way. Police admitted the perpetrator or perpetrators might have left the country.

Forensic teams at the scene examined the lorry, which has Hungarian number plates. Channel 4 News’ Lindsey Hilsum tweeted that the “smell of death” at the scene was overwhelming. On Thursday afternoon police towed the vehicle to a nearby hall, and began the task of removing bodies.

The 7.5-tonne vehicle used to belong to the Slovak chicken meat company Hyza and still has the slogan “Honest chicken” on the side. The company said it sold the lorry in 2014. According to the Hungarian government, it is registered to a Romanian citizen from the central city of Kecskemét.

In a statement Austria’s interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, denounced the traffickers as criminals and said: “Today is a dark day.” She said Austria would adopt a zero-tolerance policy towards the mafia gangs responsible.

She added: “This tragedy is a concern for us all. Smugglers are criminals. They have no interest in the welfare of refugees. Only profit.”

The EU has found itself overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the problem, with a record number of 107,500 migrants crossing the EU’s border last month. Chaotic attempts by Macedonian police to hold back refugees last week failed. On Wednesday the UN’s refugee agency said it expected 3,000 people a day to enter Macedonia from Greece until at least the end of the year.

Berlin, backed by Austria, wants a new system of mandatory quotas for refugees across the EU despite the issue being rejected in acrimonious scenes by EU leaders at a summit in June. Germany expects 800,000 asylum applications this year. The EU has also proposed a common “safe countries of origin” list, which would see migrants from these nations swiftly deported.

Delegates meeting on Thursday in Vienna held a minute’s silence for the victims of the lorry tragedy. The EU’s enlargement commissioner, Johannes Hahn, tweeted: “Just another terrible incident, illustrating the urgent need for quick and determined common action.”

Austria’s chancellor, Werner Faymann, said it was crucial for nations to find a collective solution to the migrant crisis. “Today refugees lost the lives they had tried to save by escaping, but lost them at the hands of traffickers,” he said. Faymann said he supported a quota system – so far rejected by Spain and most of eastern Europe.

There was frustration from Serbia, an EU candidate, which accused Brussels of failing to stop the wave of refugees flowing through the Balkans.

“It’s a European Union problem, but we’re expected to come up with an action plan,” Serbia’s foreign minister Ivica Dačić complained, adding: “We bear the brunt of the burden.”

With the EU’s common border policy increasingly dysfunctional, member states are taking matters into their own hands. Hungary is building a new fence along its border with Serbia, though this week refugees got through with relative ease. Germany’s foreign minister, Franz-Walter Steinmeier, said he opposed the initiative. “We are not advocates of fences,” Steinmeier said.

On Tuesday, meanwhile, Austrian police arrested three drivers on suspicion of transporting migrants from Syria and other war-torn areas into the European Union. One of them had driven 34 people packed into the back of a white van across the Austrian border.

The group included 10 small children, whom the driver abandoned by the side of the motorway near the city of Bruck an der Leitha. According to police, the migrants said in interviews they were hardly able to breathe during the trip.

They had asked repeatedly for more air, but the driver had ignored their requests, police added, and had driven without stopping from Serbia to Austria.

Amnesty International’s Europe deputy director, Gauri van Gulik, said the countries in the region needed urgently to do more.

“People dying in their dozens – whether crammed into a truck or a ship – en route to seek safety or better lives is a tragic indictment of Europe’s failures to provide alternative routes.

“Europe has to step up and provide protection to more, share responsibility better and show solidarity to other countries and to those most in need.”