A 50-year-old man suspected of masterminding a gang of migrant smugglers involved in the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants who were found dead in a refrigerated truck near London in 2019 pleaded guilty today to manslaughter.

Marius Mihai Drezici, a Romanian national, will be sentenced at a hearing at a date to be determined.

Drezici was remanded in custody after appearing at the Old Bailey in London.

The 39 Vietnamese migrants – the youngest of whom were two 15-year-old boys – died of suffocation and hypothermia in shipping containers as they were transported to what they hoped would be a better life in the UK.

The horrific incident then demonstrated the operation of illegal immigration networks.

Leaders of the gang, Ronan Hughes, a 41-year-old lorry driver from Northern Ireland, and Gheorghe Nika, a 43-year-old Romanian national, accused of organizing the trafficking, were sentenced in January 2021 to 20 and 27 years in prison respectively for manslaughter. negligence and migrant smuggling.

Maurice Robison, who was driving the truck when the bodies were discovered, was jailed for 13 years and four months. Eamon Harrison, the 24-year-old driver who had taken the container to the Belgian port of Zeebrugge, and had claimed he was unaware of the presence of the migrants inside the container, was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

The case led to legal proceedings in other European countries as well.

A Vietnamese accused of leading the network’s Belgian core was sentenced in early 2022 to 15 years in prison by the criminal court in Bruges, while French justice ordered the trial of 19 men suspected of being part of a large network that trafficked illegal immigrants from Vietnam to Europe.