#THE REBEL VIETNAMESE MOVIE CAST DRIVERS#
Ten of the accused - three Belgians, six Moroccans and an Armenian - were taxi drivers in Brussels and are accused of ferrying people to the safe house. Twelve of the defendants were charged for having worked as safehouse guards or grocery shoppers who fetched food for migrants being smuggled. Most of the defendants were allegedly members of the people-smuggling ring. The migrants suffocated to death in the container on the back of this lorry in 38.5C temperatures as they crossed the Channel from Belgium to Essex Several suspects have already been convicted and incarcerated in Britain and Vietnam in connection with the case while in France, 26 more have been charged and face trial. The 18 others sentenced after Vo were given prison terms of under five years, most of them suspended. Of the 23, a total of 19 - including Vo - were convicted and four were acquitted. Vo was one of 23 suspects - both Belgians and Vietnamese - put on trial after a May 2020 police operation in which several addresses, most in the Brussels region, were raided and Vietnamese suspected of links to the gang were rounded up. The victims - 31 men and eight women aged between 15 and 44, all Vietnamese - died from suffocation and hyperthermia in the confined space of the container, which arrived on a ferry from Zeebrugge. Vo Van Hong, 45, was convicted of running a criminal organisation in Belgium involved in smuggling a total of 115 identified people to Britain between September 2018 and the date of his arrest in May 2020, more than two years after the truck full of corpses was found in October 2019.Īt least 15 of the 39 dead had passed through the Belgian-based trafficking network, which operated two safe houses in the Anderlecht district of Brussels for migrants heading to Britain. A Vietnamese trafficking ringleader who sent 39 of his own countrymen to their deaths in a lorry discovered in an Essex industrial estate has been jailed for 15 years in Belgium.