A truly harrowing report

Austrian police have just found a refrigerated lorry with Hungarian plates abandoned on the hard shoulder of a highway close to the country’s border with Hungary.

The doors to the back of the lorry had been left open and inside there were bodies in such an advanced stage of putrefaction that the police were unable to tell the media how many they had found. They say there may be up to 50.

The corpses, the Austrian police said, are those of migrants. This means they would have died in the locked, airless container in the summer heat, of suffocation and heat-stroke – or refrigeration. It doesn’t even bear thinking about.

The online comments from unfeeling bastards have begun already. If the lorry had been found to have held the corpses of 50 suffocated dogs, there would have been a flood of angry comments of pity for the dogs and disgust at those who did it. But human life is cheaper.