TEHRAN -- Iran’s top human rights official says migrants are victims of the United States’ media propaganda after dozens of South American asylum seekers were found dead in a truck in sweltering heat en route to the U.S. state of Texas earlier this week.
Kazem Gharibabadi, secretary of Iran’s High Council for Human Rights and the Judiciary chief’s deputy for international affairs, made the remark in a post on his Twitter account after a truck, carrying migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, was discovered abandoned on Monday in a desolate area near a highway on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas, about 250 km north of the U.S.-Mexico border.
The death toll from the tragedy hit 53 on Wednesday as local authorities reported two more migrants, initially hospitalized over their ordeal inside a suffocatingly hot tractor-trailer, had lost their lives.
“Encouraged by the U.S.-orchestrated media hype to find a non-existent better life, the now-dead migrants take perilous journeys to find one in the imaginary land of opportunities, but to no avail,” Gharibabadi wrote on Thursday.
The Texan city of San Antonio on Wednesday was the scene of a candlelight vigil accompanied by songs of grief and words of rage in commemoration of the dead migrants in the tragic incident.