Arrests over refugee truck deaths as toll rises to 71, including children

At least three people have been arrested in Hungary in connection with the deaths of 71 refugees found dead in a truck on an Austrian highway, Austrian police said on Friday.

Austrian police said three people had been arrested while their Hungarian counterparts said four were in detention. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy.

"In addition, police have conducted house searches ... and questioned almost 20 people as witnesses," police added. Separately, a police spokeswoman told national news agency MTI that there were no Hungarian citizens among the suspects.

The deaths have sparked calls by officials and migrant organizations to create legal pathways for the waves of refugees traveling to Europe.

At a news conference in the town of Eisenstadt, Hans Peter Doskozil, police chief for the province of Burgenland, said one Syrian travel document had been found among the victims but that it was too early to say from which countries the entire group had come.

Of the 71 dead, 59 were men, 8 were women, and four were children, including a girl estimated at 1-2 years old and three boys of roughly 8-10 years.

"We currently have three people under arrest in Hungary... and expect that that this is the trace that will lead us to the perpetrators," Doskozil told reporters earlier on Friday, making clear that the people being held were not ringleaders.

The refrigerated truck was found by an Austrian motorway patrol near the Hungarian border just before lunchtime on Thursday, with fluids from the decomposing bodies seeping from its back door.

The vehicle had come to Austria from Hungary and authorities believe it had been parked on the highway for at least 24 hours before it was discovered.

Doskozil said there were "signs" that a Bulgarian-Hungarian trafficker ring was behind the deaths. Of the three people arrested in Hungary, one was Bulgarian-Lebanese, another Bulgarian and the third of Hungarian nationality.

Thousands of people from countries like Afghanistan or Syria have fled through the Balkans to Austria, pushing the number of asylum requests to 28,300 in the first six months of this year — more than the total for all of 2014.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said it would continue to monitor the transit of refugees across the Balkans.

"In the absence of a managed migration strategy, the deaths, reportedly, of dozens of victims who suffocated in the back of a truck in Austria this week, remind all of us of the consequences of leaving those seeking safety and a better life at the mercy of human smugglers," IOM Director General William Lacy Swing said in a press release.

"Just as we have seen on the Mediterranean for these last three years, just as we have heard of similar tragedies in the Sahara, the specter of death now haunts the European continent. Something must be done, and soon, to make all migration legal and safe."

Austria's Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner echoed that sentiment, saying the best way to handle the refugee crisis was to create legal pathways into Europe, rather than stricter border controls.

The 28 member states of the European Union have not yet agreed on introducing binding quotas for the distribution of refugees. Leaders of the EU declared this week that it has "failed" in the face of human agony on its frontiers.

Meanwhile, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday the number of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean to reach Europe has passed 300,000 this year, up from 219,000 in the whole of 2014. 

Al Jazeera and Reuters