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The body of a drowned migrant  was pulled on Thursday from a boat that sank off the coast of Libya.Credit Mohamed Ben Khalifa/Associated Press

VIENNA — They were the lucky ones. Packed into a small white truck, 34 migrants, 10 of them children, had made the hourslong drive from Serbia, begging for air in broiling summer temperatures. According to the police, the three people smuggling this human cargo into Austria refused to stop.

But on Tuesday on the A4 highway that links Vienna and Budapest, the truck reached its destination and pulled over. The migrants hustled out. An Austrian policeman on his way to work spotted the scene, alerted colleagues and followed the truck. As the three smugglers headed back toward Hungary, the Austrian police arrested them before they were across the border.

On Thursday, another truck was opened at the side of the same Austrian highway, but the consequences were far more grim: 71 migrants, including four children, were found dead in the back compartment that had at one time been refrigerated, likely asphyxiated in the summer heat.

The discovery provided the most tragic evidence to date of a crime that the authorities said has been proliferating in Europe since the migrant crisis shifted east: an increase in human trafficking over land routes by smugglers who are cashing in on the human flow from war-torn and strife-ridden places like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Africa.

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Along an Austrian highway, a truck in which 71 bodies were discovered.Credit Roland Schlager/European Pressphoto Agency

The authorities said that cars, vans and trucks have been crisscrossing national borders, ferrying migrants toward desired destinations, like Germany and other more prosperous European countries in the north, exploiting the migrants’ willingness to hand over hundreds or thousands of euros for taxi rides or longer hauls that often cost 10 or 20 times what they should.

But until the grisly findings in the truck in Austria, the practice had not stirred significant political or popular outrage, law enforcement authorities and others said on Friday. And while arrests have been on the rise throughout Europe, they have not kept up with the pipeline of people more than willing to step in and take advantage of the migrants’ plights.

At a news conference on Thursday, Austria’s interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, appeared shaken and angry; she has been arguing for a greater European Union response to smuggling for more than a year. “If someone continues to assert that smugglers are somehow helping people in need — that person really needs help,” she said.

The Austrian authorities have seen traffickers try “everything imaginable” to smuggle people in, said Katerina Kratzmann, the head of the Austrian office of the International Organization for Migration — from stuffing people into hidden niches in the front and side of cars to stowing away people in spaces above rolling tires. Some even help migrants slip over borders, and evade registration and possible detention, by having them ride shoulder to shoulder as regular passengers in cars, she said.

Alexandra Hareter, the spokeswoman for the Police Department in the town of Neusiedel, on the highway southeast of Vienna, where the truck with the 71 corpses was found, said the police in her area register 150 to 200 migrants smuggled in every day.

News of smuggling operations and arrests are almost daily occurrences. On Friday, as the authorities announced that 71 bodies had been found in the truck — far more than they had estimated on Thursday — an Austrian court sentenced a Bulgarian to three years in jail for smuggling 54 people into Austria. One woman in his truck had collapsed and barely survived, the Austrian public broadcaster said.

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In Hungary on Friday, 10 people were hurt when a van with at least 18 migrants from Syria overturned on the M5 highway, in what the police suspect was another smuggling attempt.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said most of the smugglers have “absolutely no regard for human life.” And officials, aid workers and refugees said it was only a matter of time before the pursuit of quick cash led to tragedy.

Up until now, most of the attention has focused on the mounting toll in the Mediterranean, where smugglers overcrowd boats with men, women and children and send them toward Europe — often with deadly results.

A United Nations refugee agency report released on Friday said the number of refugees and migrants crossing the Mediterranean increased by 40 percent this year, to 310,000 from 219,000 in 2014.

Deaths have been mounting, with more than 2,500 at sea this year — and on Thursday, more than 150 more drowned off the coast of Libya, with many of the bodies unaccounted for and others washing up on the beach.

In recent months, a new land route to the north has become popular, with tens of thousands migrating from Turkey to the Greek islands, the Greek mainland and on through Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary to wealthy Austria, Germany or beyond.

Syrian Refugees on Their Journeys

The authorities along the route seem to have been caught by surprise, as smugglers sprung up to accommodate them.

The police refused to release identity details, in keeping with Austrian privacy laws, but said the 34 migrants who poured out of the hot van last Tuesday were typical of those who come straight from Serbia.

Abdullah Zadran, 21, who fled from Afghanistan on foot after the Taliban killed his father, is one of the thousands who have made the journey, aided by smugglers. He walked from Pakistan to Bulgaria, he said, then crossed to Serbia. There, he paid a driver an amount he refused to disclose to pack him into a truck that carried him through Hungary and Austria and into Bavaria.

A German police officer found him after the three-day journey, crammed into the trailer of a heavy truck without food or water. Exhausted, he was escorted out and allowed to apply for asylum.

Other migrants cross Macedonia and Serbia by train or bus, then trudge into Hungary, where the Budapest government is hurrying to build a fence with the aim of keeping migrants out. Aid workers and others said part of the rush of migrants through the land route in recent weeks may have been precipitated by fears that the journey would become more difficult once the fence is complete, which is expected to be any day.

In Hungary, the arrivals either dodge police patrols and head north to Budapest, or get caught and registered rudimentarily at a hurriedly erected police facility in Roszke. The ones rounded up are regularly bused to Szeged, in southern Hungary, where a band of 150 volunteers guide them to crowded trains headed for Budapest.

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The rail passage to Budapest is free, but the hundreds of people who mill around the train station do not always know that. They are tempted to head north in rides that cost hundreds of euros to take them to the same destination.

“Certainly the people-smuggling community has inflated, and many who wouldn’t have launched into this a few years ago might try their luck,” said Julia Ivan, a legal officer with the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a nongovernment group aiding the refugees.

The police in Hungary have detained 776 smugglers so far this year, compared with 593 last year and 219 in 2010. In Austria, in July alone, 100 people were detained on smuggling charges.

Many are newcomers, attracted by “quick money, a couple hundred or 1,000 euros,” Ms. Ivan said.

Austrian officials, including Ms. Mikl-Leitner, have been warning for months of disaster.

An opinion article in Austria’s center-right daily Die Presse suggested Friday that action had been slow in part because cracking down on smugglers does not, in fact, ease the massive press of migration.

“Smugglers are only the most easily identified evildoers in this relay race of death,” the columnist Norbert Mayer wrote.

Ms. Mikl-Leitner’s proposal for a European policy on migration, from July 2014, called for robbing smugglers of their income by setting up centers on the E.U. borders where refugees could apply for asylum.

“This tragedy affects us all,” she said, and is a signal to Europeans “to do something as soon as possible.”

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