X-Ray Scan Reveals 513 Migrants in 2 Trucks

See link for x-ray photo of truck with migrants inside and rest of article - http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/x-ray-scan-reveals-513-mexican-migrants-in-2-trucks/?ref=americas

Source: NYT

When police ran X-ray scanners over two cargo trucks at a checkpoint in southeastern Mexico on Tuesday, they made a surprising discovery: Inside the trailer were the ghostly shadows of 513 migrants — some suffering from dehydration — packed together in near-suffocating conditions.

The police released an image of the harrowing scan, which shows how migrants sat in tight bundles or stood clutching cargo straps for hours of clandestine travel from beyond Mexico’s border with Guatemala.

Their capture thwarted what appeared to be one of the largest single shipments of illegal migrants found in recent years, The Associated Press reported. And it drew attention to the increasing use of X-ray scanners by border security and police officers to inspect vehicles on the road — not to mention the power of these machines to create frightful, captivating images.

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Still, the image captured on Tuesday is among the starkest to surface publicly so far. It opens an eerie black-and-white window into a world where $7,000 buys a small patch of space in a cramped truck with breathing holes punched in the roof, but no guarantee of making it all the way to the United States.