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Ulrike Dauer and Manuela Mesco :Grim Toll Rises in Migrant Tragedies in Austria and on the Mediterranean Police find 71 corpses inside truck near Hungarian border, as toll in twin shipwrecks climbs to 150

Posted By Ruth King on August 29th, 2015

The migrants found dead in Austria aboard a midsize truck once used to transport chickens had been crammed so tightly inside its hold that, at first, authorities didn’t think it could possibly contain more than 50 corpses.

But when police extracted their bodies on Friday they found 71, including those of four children, and uncovered fresh details of the desperate journey of those aboard. Hundreds of miles to the south, rescue workers were recovering dozens of bodies from two shipwrecks off the Libyan coast—tragedies shedding light on the brutal tactics of the people-smuggling operations that stretch from across the Mediterranean to deep within Europe’s borders.

Many of the corpses found in the truck in Austria were so decomposed that officials say they likely had died up to two days earlier, before they ever crossed into Western Europe. The truck’s cargo hold had no openings for ventilation on its sides, suggesting they suffocated, police said. Austrian authorities said an expert would examine the truck, including whether damage on its side pointed to a desperate struggle to get out.

A Syrian travel document found at the scene indicated that many had come from the war-ravaged country. Despite their better odds of being granted asylum in the European Union than migrants from elsewhere, aid groups say more Syrian refugees are turning to overland smugglers as sea routes become more difficult and European governments increasingly try to block migrants traveling on their own across the continent.

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Hungarian police said that they had arrested four men—three Bulgarians and one Afghan national—suspected of being involved in the migrants’ deaths. The men, who weren’t identified, included the alleged driver of the truck, Austrian police said.

The extent of Europe’s spiraling migration crisis was made even more apparent by news Friday that the death toll in twin shipwrecks near the Libyan coast had reached 150 people, with many more feared dead. Two boats, estimated to be carrying as many as 500 migrants altogether, had capsized the night before as they embarked on the perilous passage toward European shores.

European governments have responded to mounting casualties by promising tougher laws against people smugglers and measures aimed at dissuading at least those migrants without a well-founded asylum claim to attempt the dangerous trip.

Hungary, one of the main points of entry for migrants arriving via southeastern Europe, is building a razor-wire fence on its border to Serbia and considering allowing the police to use guns to protect the nation’s borders. Authorities also are weighing barring migrants from traveling within the country.

Germany has welcomed more migrants than any other country in Europe and relaxed entry conditions for Syrian migrants this week, but it is also considering cuts in cash handouts for asylum seekers and faster repatriations for rejected applicants.

Activists and migration experts said some of the very barriers being erected at the EU’s borders to stem the growing stream of people from the Middle-East, Africa, Afghanistan and southwestern Europe may be partly to blame for the booming smuggling trade.

Migrants are resorting to smugglers “as no other means of transport—such as train or bus—is available to them,” said Magdalena Majkowska-Tomkin of the International Organization for Migration in Hungary. “Migrants are routinely taken off trains and buses bound for Austria and Germany from Hungary.”

When Austrian and Italian police began stopping migrants from boarding trains headed to Germany late last year, smugglers helped organize the passage by car. The Austrian police estimate migrants pay between €3,000 ($3,354) and €5,000 for the trip from Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq.

While capsized boats have become a sadly regular occurrence in the Mediterranean for nearly two years, Thursday’s macabre find in Austria brought evidence of the darkest side of the migrant crisis directly onto European soil.

The Austrian police and forensic experts were working on Friday to determine the identity and cause of death of the 59 men, eight women and four children—including a girl between one and two years of age—found in the truck.

The police said they believed the truck had been parked for at least 24 hours before it was found on the side of a highway near the Austrian village of Parndorf, about 20 miles from the Hungarian border. The passengers, they said, likely died up to two days earlier, possibly even before crossing into Austria.

Highway toll records showed that the truck started southeast of Budapest on early Wednesday and crossed the border into Austria after 9 a.m.

When officers eventually arrived, the vehicle was standing in the sunny day’s 86-degree heat, putrefaction fluid dripping from the cargo area. The stench was so overpowering that they had to move the truck to a former veterinary inspection site with refrigeration facilities before they could unload the bodies and count them, officials said.

“They certainly came along the western Balkan route, and had actually reached the ‘safety’ of the Schengen zone, only to die within hours of reaching their destination,” said Ms. Majkowska-Tomkin, referring to the free-travel zone that comprises 26 European countries.

Earlier this week, Austrian police arrested three smugglers who had dropped off some 34 migrants, including 10 children, on the same highway after crossing the border from Hungary. The travelers told police they had been herded in the van and could hardly breathe. According to authorities, they said the driver had refused to stop between the Serbian border and Austria.

The highway where the truck with the 71 bodies was discovered is one of the main overland migration routes into Western Europe.

Many people are now traveling from Turkey to Greece and then across the Balkans to Hungary, a course considered less risky than the often deadly sea passage across the Mediterranean. Many do the trip on foot, often following deserted railroad tracks.

While migrants reaching Italy outnumbered those reaching Greece four to one last year, the pattern has now changed dramatically, with entries into Greece overtaking Italy for the first time in at least five years. This shift has been led by Syrians, who are no longer granted the Algerian visas that they used to first travel to that country, then on to Libya to attempt the sea crossing to Europe.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, about 200,000 people arrived in Greece so far this year, while Italy received about just over half this number. It estimates 3,000 people a day are currently being moved through the Balkans.

Yet while the sea route to Italy has lost some of its appeal, it remains the most dangerous migrant road in the world, as evidenced by Thursday’s twin shipwrecks off the coast of Libya.

The two accidents involved one boat with about 40 people and another with 400, according to the IOM. Both capsized off the Libyan coast. The U.N. refugee agency estimated the two boats might even have been carrying a total of 500 people, 200 of whom could be dead.

A Libyan coast guard official said that rescue efforts were hampered by the darkness and that hopes for finding survivors were quickly fading.

“It’s a recovery mission now,” he said. “Too much time has passed for it to be reasonable that more people survived.”

The huge surge in migrant numbers, plus EU countries’ moves to erect new obstacles to their entry, has contributed to more aggressive tactics by people smugglers, most notably in Libya. When migrants have resisted boarding rickety boats, smugglers have forced them on at gunpoint, according to survivors’ accounts to aid groups. They charge extra for life jackets, which very few migrants pay for. They load huge numbers of people onto vessels that often take on water just after leaving the Libyan coast.

Earlier this week, a Swedish coast guard ship found 51 corpses in the hold of a boat, during a rescue operation off the Libyan coast. According to aid groups, migrants were probably asphyxiated by the fumes of the engine and couldn’t exit the hold.

The UNHCR said that, according to survivors rescued by the Swedish coast guard, migrants had to pay smugglers just to get out of the hold and breathe. One of the survivors told aid workers he paid €3,000 to get his wife and 2-year-old son onto the top deck; another said smugglers beat them with sticks to force them down in the hold.

On Aug. 15, over 40 migrants were found dead after being locked in the hull of a wooden boat. According to the Italian navy, they died in a pool of “water, fuel and human excrement,” while those on the upper deck survived.

According to the IOM, more than 2,300 people have died in the Mediterranean while they were trying to cross to Europe so far this year.

—Giovanni Legorano in Milan and Margit Feher in Budapest contributed to this article.

Write to Ulrike Dauer at ulrike.dauer@wsj.com and Manuela Mesco at manuela.mesco@wsj.com

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