British officials responded angrily yesterday as it emerged that Belgian police may have arrested, and then released, the 58 Chinese illegal immigrants who died en route to Dover on Sunday.
Belgium's Interior Ministry has said that a group of Chinese, similar in age and composition to those whose corpses were found crammed into a tomato truck on Monday at Dover, was briefly held in Belgium in April. Belgian police detained them, took fingerprints and then ordered them to leave the European Union's passport-free Schengen area - of which Britain is not a member.
British officials said it was ludicrous that Belgian authorities had ordered the group to get out, but had made no attempt to enforce the order. They were also angry that the Schengen area, which includes 10 of the 15 EU nations, was specified as the exclusion zone.
"They (the Belgian police) told them they had to go, but then they were put on a train with no law enforcement officer present," a source close to the investigation said yesterday.
The Belgian Interior Ministry spokesman, Mr Pascal Smet, said: "They were put on a train to Antwerp," but he added that he did not know whether they stayed in Belgium, went to another country or returned to China.
Later, Mr Smet told BBC radio: "The immigration service decided the best thing to do was to give an order to leave the Schengen space." Asked whether going to Britain would fulfil that order, Mr Smet said: "That counts as leaving the Schengen space, yes." But he denied that Belgium was "offloading" illegal immigrants into Britain.
Britain is the nearest non-Schengen country to Belgium and there are frequent ferry connections across the English Channel.
"It does seem a bit ludicrous that they would go to all this effort and then say, `OK, thanks, would you please leave now'? It raises some fairly fundamental questions about the efficiency and the effectiveness of the process," one British official said.
Yesterday, the Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, said the tragedy emphasised the importance of taking action at the European level, telling parliament: "It seems almost certain these people travelled through several European countries before they came here."
Meanwhile, two people, both of Chinese origin, have been arrested in the hunt for the trafficking ring behind the deaths, a spokesman for Kent police confirmed last night. He said they were holding a man and a woman from London. They were being detained in Canterbury.
Dutch police also arrested a second Rotterdam man yesterday on Tuesday evening. Prosecutors said yesterday that they had detained the 24-year-old man who had registered the transport company Van der Spek with the Rotterdam Chamber of Commerce before the truck travelled from Zeebrugge, Belgium to Dover. Chamber of Commerce records identified that person as Mr Arie van der Spek.
Police yesterday discovered a group of 24 asylum seekers, thought to be Romanian, attempting to flee Britain in a Milan-bound freight wagon at Wembley.