Essex lorry deaths: A Timeline of events leading up to discovery of 39 bodies
Friday 25 October 2019 14:10, UK
The bodies of 39 Chinese people have been found in a lorry in Essex after reaching the UK from Belgium.
Here is a timeline of the sequence of events leading up to the discovery of the bodies.
A tractor unit of the lorry enters the UK via Holyhead in North Wales, having travelled over from Dublin.
The lorry cab was seen parked in Waterglade Industrial Park in Grays in Thurrock, Essex, by two witnesses.
One witness told Sky News they spotted the cab at around 7.15am, while another said they saw it parked there in the afternoon.
The container arrives at Zeebrugge on Tuesday afternoon at 2.49pm local time and leaves the port the same day, a police investigation finds.
Zeebrugge is a large container, bulk cargo, new vehicles and passenger ferry terminal port in the municipality of Bruges in Flanders, northwest Belgium. It was identified as a people smuggling hot spot three years ago.
It handles over 50 million tonnes of cargo every year.
Later on Tuesday, the container leaves the port and travels to the UK by sea.
The container arrives just after midnight on Wednesday in Purfleet, Essex.
It was then picked up by the lorry cab at around at 1.05am.
Around five minutes later, CCTV footage shows the lorry and container driving towards the Waterglade Industrial Park on Eastern Avenue in Grays.
Essex police received reports of a number of people discovered inside a lorry container at 1.40am.
Ambulance staff found all 39 victims, including a young adult woman, dead inside the container. Police previously reported she was a teenager.
Police have since said eight of the deceased are women and 31 are men. All are believed to be Chinese nationals.
The lorry driver, a 25-year-old man from Northern Ireland, was arrested on suspicion of murder and remains in police custody. He has been named as Mo Robinson from Portadown in Co Armagh, Northern Ireland.
The lorry cab is believed to have originated in Ireland. It had "Ireland" emblazoned on the windscreen along with the message "The Ultimate Dream".
Three properties in County Armagh have been searched in connection with the police investigation.
Shortly before 5pm, the lorry was driven away from the industrial estate in Essex.
Essex Police said in a statement: "The lorry has since been removed from the industrial park to allow the next stage of our investigative process to be conducted in peace, and to give the utmost dignity to those within the trailer as we prepare for a coroner's post mortem.
"Each of the 39 people must undergo a full coroner's process to establish a cause of death, before we move on to attempting to identify each individual within the trailer. This will be a substantial operation and, at this stage, we cannot estimate how long these procedures will take."
