AUSTRIA — Three suspected smugglers were arrested after Austrian authorities discovered the bodies of 71 refugees inside an abandoned truck near Vienna, laying bare the urgency of Europe’s biggest migration crisis since World War II.

Eight women and four children — one of them an infant girl — were among the dead found in a refrigerator truck with a Hungarian license plate yesterday 50km east of the Austrian capital, police said. Three men suspected of human trafficking were taken into custody in Hungary.

“This should be a wake-up call, a warning that we need to have a European solution quickly,” Austrian Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner told reporters at a press conference in Eisenstadt south of Vienna.

As the crisis grows, European Union governments are bickering over how to deal with the tide of migration by those fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa. Austria and Germany, which expects 800,000 refugees this year, renewed calls to share the burden of helping migrants throughout the 28-member bloc — something that other member countries reject.

“We need a fair distribution of the refugees and asylum seekers whose applications are approved,” Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters today (Aug 28) in Berlin, adding the EU may hold a special summit on the crisis once governments have agreed on proposals for dealing with the crisis.

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Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said the EU should stop sponsoring projects in countries like the UK, Poland, Czech Republic and Baltic nations that refuse to take on refugees.

“The European Union doesn’t work if one says I don’t care about the problems of the other,” Mr Faymann told Austrian radio Oe1 today. “We are a net contributor, so is Germany, and we contribute to projects where we don’t benefit either.”

Elsewhere, Libyan authorities in the western port city of Zuwara found as many as 200 bodies of migrants who drowned offshore after two boats capsized yesterday, Italian news agency ANSA reported. Some 60 bodies were recovered, while darkness prevented authorities from recovering others, ANSA said.

Police in Austria made the grim discovery in the truck, which started its journey on Wednesday, after noticing a stench and blood dripping out of it. The highway, which runs between Budapest and Vienna, is used by asylum seekers heading for Austria and northern Europe. A Syrian passport among the bodies suggests the migrants had come from the war-ravaged country.

Mr Hans Peter Doskozil, police chief in the Austrian state of Burgenland, said Hungarian authorities had arrested two Bulgarian nationals and a Hungarian believed to be the drivers and owner of the vehicle. Authorities had initially made seven arrests and released four, he said.

The truck bore an image of a chicken and other meats, advertising Slovak company Hyza, a unit of Agrofert Holding, owned by Czech Finance Minister Andrej Babis. A slogan on the vehicle read “I taste so good because they feed me so well.” Hyza said it sold the truck in 2014 to another Slovak company, which in turn sold the vehicle to Mastermobilker in Hungary. BLOOMBERG