Europe Refugee Crisis: In Austria, Dozens Of Dead Migrants Found In Truck Near Vienna

A truck holding the decaying bodies of 30 to 50 refugees was found on a road in eastern Austria on Thursday. The truck was found parked near the capital Vienna, and one Twitter user said that police couldn't say exactly how many bodies were in the truck because of the level of decay of the bodies. A journalist who drove by the scene described what she called "refugees" and a "terrible smell of death as we passed."

"We can assume that there may be 20 people have died, it is also 40 to 50," a police spokesman said. The deaths occurred a long time ago, according to news sites reporting on the bodies, and it appeared that the refugees suffocated while traveling from Serbia.

Austria has been experiencing an influx of refugee applications lately, largely a result of the ongoing turmoil in Syria and the Middle East. More than 28,300 people applied for refugee status in Austria in the first six months of 2015, and thousands more have been looking to other European countries for help. The influx has been described as the biggest immigration and refugee crisis in the continent since World War II.