Christopher Kennedy, from County Armagh in Northern Ireland, is due to appear at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court in Essex over 39 Vietnamese found dead in truck, southeast England, on Monday, police said, AFP reported.

He has been charged with conspiracy to arrange or facilitate the travel of people with a view to exploitation, and conspiracy to facilitate the commission of a breach of British immigration law.

Kennedy was arrested early Friday on the M40 motorway.

The bodies of eight women and 31 men were found in a refrigeration trailer on an industrial estate east of London in Essex, on Oct 23.

The trailer had earlier arrived on a cargo ferry from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge.

Truck driver Mo Robinson, 25, from Northern Ireland, has appeared in court charged with 39 counts of manslaughter, conspiracy to traffic people, conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration and money laundering.

He is scheduled to appear at an administrative hearing at a London court on Monday.

Another man from Northern Ireland, 22-year-old Eamonn Harrison, is facing extradition proceedings for the same charges and appeared in court in Dublin on Thursday.

The case was adjourned until Dec 12.

Three other people have also been arrested, questioned and released on bail as part of the investigation.

Essex Police detectives last month said they wanted to speak to two brothers – also from Northern Ireland – about the case and urged them to hand themselves in.

Many of the victims were from impoverished central Vietnam, where the main source of income is from fishing, farming or factory work.

Many families took on thousands of dollars of debt to send their children to Britain, in the hope they would land good jobs and send money back to pay off the loans.

The incident has laid bare the dangers of illegal migration in Britain, where Vietnamese nationals have often found work in nail bars or illegal cannabis farms.

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Nguyen Thi Phong and Pham Van Thin live in a small house in Nghen, a town in Vietnam’s Ha Tinh province. It has a corrugated metal roof, propped up on loose bricks, and a Vietnamese flag flies outside. Iran News quotes the report of Essex truck victims wrote by CNN.

It has not yet been confirmed that Pham Thi Tra My was one of the victims on the truck, but her family said they fear the worst. UK authorities are working with their Vietnamese counterparts to identify the victims but have not yet officially named any of them or confirmed their nationalities.

Speaking to CNN in the family’s home in Vietnam, Pham Van Thin was still overcome with grief, saying it was “very painful” to receive the text. He said his daughter must have known she was going to die when she sent it.

Pham Van Thin said he and his wife paid around $40,000 to send their daughter to the UK, where she is believed to have been one of the victims of the Essex truck disaster.

“I’ve lost both my loved one and my money,” Pham said, adding that the smugglers they paid did not tell the family how they would transport Tra My to the UK. She traveled to the country via China and France, but eventually fell out of contact with her family, after which Pham reported her missing.

By then it was too late, Pham Thi Tra My and the other 38 people on board the truck were trapped and running out of oxygen.

Nguyen Thi Phong said she hoped the UK authorities could help bring her daughter’s body home.

“The smugglers said that this was a … safe route, that people would go by airplane, car … if I had known she would go by this route, I would not have let her go,” Pham said.

Nguyen Thi Phong said she is now dependent on the British and Vietnamese authorities to bring home their daughter. Neither she or her husband know whether they will ever get any of the money back they spent funding their daughter’s doomed journey.

Nguyen Thi Phong and Pham Van Thin’s home in Vietnam’s Ha Tinh province.

Four people arrested due to investigation about Essex Truck

Much is still unclear about this tragedy, which came to light in the early hours of Wednesday morning UK time, when paramedics were called to a truck container at an industrial park outside London. Inside they found the bodies of 31 men and eight woman, all believed to be either Chinese or Vietnamese nationals.

UK police appear to have established that the truck and its container followed two separate routes — coming together towards the end of the journey shortly before the grisly discovery.

They have arrested the truck driver, a 25-year-old Northern Irish man who met the container near where it was discovered, having driven from Northern Ireland via Wales. The container itself had traveled from the Belgian port of Zeebrugge.

Three other people have also been arrested, as police in the UK and Belgium continue their investigations.

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