News of the 24-year-old driver’s arrest was published by Portuguese national news outlet JN last week. The Brazilian has reportedly been held in custody since January 1st and was due to appear in court today.
The news report contains a quote from the trucker’s wife, who explained that she has been cut off from her husband since the start of the year.
“He left on the trip, if I’m not mistaken, on December 27th. He passed through Spain and France, and England was his final destination. On January 1st, he made a call to his father from a police station in Bristol, saying that they had found stowaways in the load in his trailer. They blamed him for it and since then we have never heard from him,” the partner of the accused lorry driver told JN.
She continued:
“He is innocent. He has already made several trips to England and this had never happened to him. He called us in desperation. This really happens a lot on that route. The Port of Calais is a mess, with migrants who hit truck drivers or hide in the truck. When crossing by ferry to England, they go through the x-ray and they can see the immigrants. In Lucas’s case it was through the Eurotunnel, where there are no x-rays. He was blamed for that in England.”
The JN report claims that the accused lorry driver and his father both work for the Primafrio Group, but with different companies.
In the case of the driver who was arrested, he is said to be an employee of Primafrio Group subsidiary Doctrans.
Doctrans has a base about a 45-minute drive from Lisbon, and the embedded Google Street View image below shows that the facility is home to numerous Primafrio-branded trailers.
According to JN, the family of the Doctrans driver are furious with his employers and the parent company due to a lack of support.
They allege that apart from receiving notice that a lawyer was working on the case, the group have not provided any further updates.
The father of the young driver who was arrested has also told of how difficult it has been to get in contact with his son.
“To call him, it’s the biggest bureaucracy. Visiting him is practically impossible. Today I went to the lawyer and credited 30 pounds to his prison account so he could call me. The company let me down,” the father of the accused told JN.
JN reports that its team tried to contact Doctrans by telephone about the case, but could not get through. Trans.INFO has also reached out to Primafrio Group for its reaction to the reports from Portugal.
Photo: Paul Evans / Flickr / CC BY 2.0 (image cropped and used for illustrative purposes only)