Romanian convicted in the UK for the death of the 39 Vietnamese in the “horror truck” caught in Bucharest

The Bucharest police has arrested today the Romanian sentenced to 27 years in prison in Great Britain, in the case of the death of 39 Vietnamese immigrants found suffocated in a truck in 2019.

The man was heard by a prosecutor from the Prosecutor’s Office attached to the Bucharest Court of Appeal and was detained for 24 hours, to be presented at the Bucharest Court of Appeal, with a proposal for provisional arrest, with a view to extradition to Great Britain.

Gheorghe Nica, with dual Romanian and British citizenship, was found guilty of the deaths of 39 men, women and children of Vietnamese origin, whose bodies were discovered in a container in October 2019.

Nica, who coordinated the operation, admitted before the court that he took part in the illegal transports in the first two runs, on October 11 and 18, 2019, but insists that in the third one, which resulted in the death of the Vietnamese, he did not was involved and did not know that there were people in the container, but thought it was a shipment of cigarettes.

In October 2019, 39 people were found dead in an industrial park near London. The victims of the “horror truck” were 28 men, eight women and three children, Vietnamese nationals, aged between 15 and 44. Before they died, they tried to call the Vietnamese emergency service for help.

According to the investigators, the temperature inside the container exceeded 38.5 degrees Celsius, which led to the death of all the people in the truck by asphyxiation and hyperthermia or overheating.