An anonymous emergency telephone call yesterday led authorities to halt a train that contained a group of ‘suffocating’ migrants, two of whom were dead, police in Texas have confirmed.
Police said that Union Pacific, a freight-hauling railroad company, ‘will lead the investigation.’
Read Also: 30 Migrants Declared Missing After Boat Capsizes Off Libya
Temperatures near where the train was stopped reached 87 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) in the late afternoon, according to KSAT.com, an affiliate of ABC TV in San Antonio.
Uvalde, where police received the 911 emergency call at 3:50 pm (2050 GMT), burst into the news 10 months ago with a mass elementary school shooting.
An 18-year-old former student at the school fatally shot 19 students and two teachers with an AR-15 assault-style rifle before police finally killed him.
It marked the third-deadliest school shooting in US history after a 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut.
In another report, no fewer than 30 migrants have reportedly gone missing and presumed drowned after the overcrowded boat they were on capsized during a rescue attempt by a cargo ship off Libya’s coast, Italy’s coastguard disclosed yesterday.
According to the coastguard, no fewer than seventeen migrants were saved and a search was underway for the missing after the early-morning attempted rescue in a search-and-rescue zone under the jurisdiction of Libya.
‘During the rescue operations… the boat capsized during the transfer of the migrants: 17 people were rescued and recovered by the (cargo) vessel while approximately 30 migrants were missing,’ said the coastguard.