Vienna: Austrian police said on Saturday that they intercepted another truck containing 26 migrants days after 71 people died in an abandoned vehicle. The vehicle, pulled over by police after a chase, contained 26 ‘illegal foreigners’ from Syria, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who said they wanted to go to Germany, police said.

Moreover, police said three young children of the truck had to be hospitalised.

‘The three small children had to be hospitalised... because of the extremely bad state of their health. Doctors said they were treated for severe dehydration,’ police said in a statement about the incident on Friday morning.

‘If the journey had continued the situation could probably have become critical,’ said a spokesman from police in Upper Austria.

The incident happened near Braunauam Inn in western Austria close to the border with Germany. The Romanian driver, who had refused to pull over for a routine check, was arrested.

On Thursday an abandoned truck containing the bodies of 71 dead migrants including four children was found on a motorway in eastern Austria near the Hungarian border, provoking international revulsion.

Autopsies were still being carried out but police think that the migrants, likely from Syria, suffocated from lack of air and had been dead for up to two days before the refrigerated truck was noticed by motorway maintenance workers.

Austria borders Hungary, which has seen more than 140,000 migrants enter from Serbia this year, most of whom then seek to travel onwards to western European countries like Germany and Sweden, via Austria.