Maputo - Sixty-four people believed to
be migrants from Ethiopia have been found dead in a container
attached to a truck in Mozambique, provincial migration
authorities and the police said on Tuesday.
Police and immigration authorities stopped the truck en
route from Malawi in the early hours of the morning in the
province of Tete, bordered by Malawi on one side and Zimbabwe on
the other, they said.
Amelia Direito, spokeswoman for Tete migration services,
said the officials checked the container after hearing banging
coming from inside. They found 14 people alive among the bodies
of 64 who had died from suspected asphyxiation.
The survivors were now being held at an immigration
facility, she added.
Many poor migrants travel via Mozambique on their way into
South Africa, where
they usually hope to find better work.
The driver of the truck told a local TV station that he had
been approached in Malawi by an individual who offered him money
to take the migrants into Mozambique.
"Two people were detained in connection to the incident, the
driver and a middleman, who contracted the driver to ferry these
people," police spokesman Orlando Mudumane said.