The British ambassador to Vietnam will meet with representatives from the country’s foreign ministry on Monday to exchange further information, the report said, and the local authorities have begun taking hair and nail samples from families who fear their relatives may be among the dead, to aid in DNA verification.

The police in Britain said the formal identification of the victims and the verification of their nationalities would take some time, with officers tasked with processing all the property that was with the victims in the lorry, including mobile phones.

A number of additional arrests have been made in relation to the deaths. On Friday, a 38-year-old man and a 38-year-old woman from Warrington in northern England were arrested, and later in the day a 46-year-old man from Northern Ireland was arrested at Stansted Airport, near London. All three were questioned on suspicion of manslaughter and conspiracy to traffic people and then later released on bail.

The container in which the bodies were found had been transported on a ship from zeebrugge, Belgium, to the British port of Purfleet in Essex. The tractor unit of the truck, driven by Mr Robinson, entered Britain from Ireland before it collected the trailer.

On Saturday, Irish police arrested a 23-year-old truck driver at Dublin Port, after he returned to the country by ferry from France. Belgian authorities say the man had transported the refrigerated container from Belgium to Ireland before its fateful return journey across the channel.

Eric Van Der Sypt, a spokesman for the Belgian public prosecutors office, told The Guardian on Monday that the man had been identified by the Belgian authorities last week.