Caolan Gormley, a haulier, has been found guilty of conspiracy to assist unlawful immigration in connection with the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants. The migrants’ bodies were discovered in a lorry trailer near Purfleet, Essex in 2019. Gormley, who had previous dealings with the people smugglers responsible for the fatal trip, is the 11th person to be convicted in the UK for their involvement in the unlawful immigration plot that resulted in the deaths.
The container, from Zeebrugge, Belgium, arrived at 00:30 BST, and half an hour later, a tractor unit collected it. The migrants had paid a fee of £10,000, which later rose to £13,000, for a “VIP” route to Europe in the hope of better-paid work. Gormley was involved in three previous smuggling operations that month, on the 11th, 14th and 18th of October, although police did not find any evidence that he was directly involved on 22 October.
Gormley ran a small haulage business and was an associate of one of the smuggling ringleaders, Ronan Hughes, with whom he had been friends since he was a teenager. Hughes and a Romanian national, Gheorghe Nica, had a network of drivers who were “willing and able” to transport lorry loads of migrants from Europe into the UK, according to the prosecution. Gormley passed messages from Hughes to one of his drivers, Christopher Kennedy, who was involved in transporting the trailers carrying the migrants.
Giving evidence in his defense during the two-week trial, Gormley stated that he was in “shock” and “total disbelief” when he heard that the victims had died. He also contended that he had only believed he was involved in smuggling illegal alcohol into the UK. Gormley will be sentenced on Friday
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