LONDON — A man and a woman were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to traffic people and manslaughter after 39 people were found dead in a refrigerated trailer in southeastern England, the British police said on Friday, the first indication from officials that the deaths were linked to human smuggling.

The arrests were announced as officials from at least five countries in two continents tried to piece together the movements of the people in the truck, and China’s Foreign Ministry on Friday said it could not confirm that the dead had all been Chinese citizens, as the British police had suggested.

Essex Police said in a statement on Friday that they had made two additional arrests in connection with the case, holding a 38-year-old man and a 39-year-old woman from Warrington in northern England. The names were not released.

Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry, said at a news conference on Friday that the British police were working on verifying the identities of the eight women and 31 men found in the truck.

“We hope that the British side will confirm their identities as soon as possible, ascertain the truth and severely punish those involved,” Ms. Hua said.

There were fears that at least one victim was Vietnamese, according to a social media post on Friday from a rights activist.

Much of the case has remained shrouded in mystery since the bodies were discovered early Wednesday in Grays, about 25 miles east of London, after someone called an ambulance.

The driver of the truck, identified as Morris Robinson, 25, from Northern Ireland, is still being held for questioning by the police on suspicion of murder. He has yet to be charged.

The case bears all the marks of a smuggling operation, officials and experts have said, and has links to Britain, China, Belgium, Ireland, Bulgaria and possibly Vietnam. The British authorities were scrambling to investigate who the victims were, who had facilitated their journey and what exactly their movements were before their fateful trip.

On Thursday, the British authorities began removing bodies from the truck, which had been driven to a secure site so that the victims could be removed in a manner that preserved their dignity, officials said.

The bodies of 11 victims were taken to a hospital to undergo post-mortem examinations, the Essex Police said in a statement, adding that the process was likely to take some time.

A Twitter post on Friday by the rights activist Hoa Nghiem revealed that the family of a Vietnamese woman, Pham Thi Tra My, 26, feared she might have been in the trailer. Her younger brother, Pham Manh Cuong, reached by phone on Friday, said his sister had traveled from Vietnam to China in early October, before flying to France.

From there, Mr. Pham said, she attempted to travel to Britain but had been stopped by the police and returned to France. Her relatives said they believed she had then made a second attempt to travel to Britain: They received a frantic message from her around 10:30 p.m. British time on Oct. 22.

“I’m sorry Mom, my path to abroad didn’t succeed,” she wrote. “Mom, I love you and Dad so much! I’m dying because I can’t breathe.”

They haven’t heard from her since.

In 2000, 58 Chinese migrants were found dead in a refrigerated truck in Dover, Britain’s busiest port. The authorities said they had asphyxiated in the container, in which cooling and ventilation were switched off.

That container had also been shipped across from Zeebrugge, Belgium, and the authorities later said the immigrants might have been brought over from the Chinese coastal province of Fujian by a criminal gang.

The deaths scandalized China at the time and prompted the government to announce a crackdown on human trafficking. But even as China has become the world’s second-largest economy in the 19 years since, the discovery on Wednesday was a reminder that many Chinese people remain mired in poverty and make desperate attempts to seek better lives abroad.

Many Chinese people also continue to leave the country to escape official repression and to seek political asylum. Experts say the numbers have fallen through the years, given China’s growing wealth, but reliable statistics on informal migration are hard to find.

Some attempting to make their way into Western countries pay middlemen known as “snakeheads” to facilitate the journey. It can cost about $50,000 to $60,000 to be smuggled into Europe and $70,000 to $80,000 for the United States, according to Sheldon Zhang, a University of Massachusetts Lowell professor who specializes in human smuggling involving Chinese citizens.

“Frankly, I am just as shocked to learn that these dead migrants were Chinese nationals,” Dr. Zhang said in an email on Friday. “I thought the snakeheads would have learned by now, from the Dover incident in 2000, not to use the lorries to transport human beings.”

Many of those who died 19 years ago were economic migrants who came from the southeastern Chinese province of Fujian. Chinese news outlets call their hometowns “foreigners’ villages” where businesses have sprouted up, offering “courier services” for people to send their children to the West.

In recent years, experts said, the main demographic leaving China for economic reasons has expanded to include people from the northeastern provinces of Jilin, Liaoning and Heilongjiang, where economic growth is depressed; and Wenzhou, a bustling coastal city in eastern Zhejiang Province.

“There are still a large number of people desperate to leave China and go overseas, mainly because these people believe that when they go overseas, they can make more money,” said Ko-lin Chin, a professor at the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice who has researched human smuggling in China.

“In the rural areas, there’s a competition going on to see who can build a bigger house,” he added. “If you go to the villages and you see a five- or six-story house, you will understand what this is all about.”

Ms. Hua, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, bristled when asked during a news conference about Chinese nationals wanting to make such an arduous trip despite the country’s economic progress.

“The Chinese people’s sense of happiness, security and satisfaction is unprecedented,” she said, later adding: “If you look around the world, there are many countries with illegal immigration issues. China is not the one with the serious problem.”

As investigators tried to bridge a major gap in the timeline of events — when and where the 39 victims had boarded the refrigerated container — Belgian officials on Thursday indicated that the container arrived in the port of Zeebrugge on Tuesday afternoon.

But they said it was still unclear when exactly the victims had entered the container, meaning they could have be inside for much longer than the nearly 11 hours between 2:49 p.m. Tuesday, when the container arrived in the Belgian port, and 1:40 a.m., when the British police reached the truck.

The container was unaccompanied while it traveled from Belgium across the English Channel to the British port of Purfleet and was collected by the driver, who had entered Britain a few days earlier from Ireland, officials said.

It is still unclear whether the driver knew what was inside the container he had picked up. Shipments to Britain from other parts of Europe are typically sealed until the point of delivery.

Megan Specia reported from London, and Sui-Lee Wee from Beijing. Chau Doan contributed reporting from Hanoi, Vietnam, and Elian Peltier from London.

Megan Specia is a story editor on the International Desk in London, specializing in digital storytelling and breaking news. She has been with The Times since 2016. @meganspecia

Sui-Lee Wee has been a correspondent for The New York Times in the Beijing bureau since October 2016. She covers business in China, Chinese consumers, health care and the intersection of demographics and the economy. @suilee

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