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Police once assumed lorry drivers caught with illegal migrants on board were innocent victims of stowaways, according to the detective in charge of the Essex lorry case.

He said the death of 39 Vietnamese migrants who suffocated hidden in an airtight trailer had changed the police approach to such illegal immigration.

Detective Chief Inspector Daniel Stoten, of Essex Police, said: "Previously there was an assumption that the lorry driver was not involved and to some sense was a victim of people getting into their trailer without their knowledge.

"What this investigation has uncovered is there are a number of organised crime groups profiting by huge amounts of money by these types of crime and it's led to a sea change in the way we investigate them."

But a Vietnamese priest in the UK said organised lorry smuggling was not new and he had warned of the dangers.

Father Simon Thang Duc Nguyen said: "They put people in the lorry without oxygen, without anything. How can you breathe? There is no way to escape, sooner later there would be a tragedy.

"I went back to Vietnam. I told them please think long and hard before you make this riAG百家乐在线官网 journey, but they chose this way."

The jury was told that the migrants had paid smugglers at least £10,000 to be hidden in a trailer and shipped across the North Sea from Belgium after being picked up in northern France.

Many had paid much more for earlier legs of their long journey from poverty in Vietnam in a bid to earn money to send home to their families.

Irish haulage boss Ronan Hughes, who had hired the trailer, admitted manslaughter. So, too, did his employee lorry driver Maurice Robinson who collected the trailer at Purfleet docks and discovered the bodies when he stopped minutes later.

Essex lorry deaths: Ten teenagers named among 39 victims

Jurors heard that a week earlier, another lorry had been stopped at Calais and 20 Vietnamese migrants were discovered hiding in the trailer and taken off.

Two of them later died on the doomed crossing in a new attempt to get into the UK.

DCI Stoten said: "It's illegal to transport animals in the way our victims were transported.

"It says a lot for the people involved in these crimes, their overt motivation was money and they didn't care for the people they were transporting and they took an unacceptable risk."

During the trial, the prosecution said the smugglers had been hiding illegal immigrants in lorries "for some considerable time" before the Essex tragedy.

But it was not the first time a lorry driver had been involved in people smuggling. In 2001, Dutch driver Perry Wacker was jailed for 14 years for manslaughter after 58 Chinese illegal immigrants were found suffocated in a lorry in Dover.

The police investigation unearthed a Chinese criminal network stretching across Europe and Asia, and headed by Jing Ping Chen - known as Little Sister Ping - operating from Rotterdam.

Her gang was thought to have smuggled 175,000 people and earned £12m over the years. She was later jailed for three years in the Netherlands.

The Essex tragedy has prompted other changes, particularly around the way in which trailers are sealed for security.

Jurors were told that the seal on the trailer had been tampered with so it looked intact, but it allowed smugglers to open and reopen the doors undetected.

In the past year, the Home Office has been working with the haulage industry to improve the security sealing of trailers.

In a statement, it said: "Border Force work closely with the Road Hauliers Association to prevent opportunist attacks on individual lorries, which can be frustrated by operators taking relatively simple measures to secure their vehicles.

"Hauliers travelling to the UK are expected to operate effective security measures to prevent illegal migrants entering their vehicles.

"We fine drivers and operators who have failed to implement such measures and migrants have been discovered in their vehicles."