Afghan Sikhs rescued from suffocating inside a shipping container at Tilbury docks in the UK have told British authorities they would die rather than continue living persecuted lives in Kabul.

The 15 Sikh families, as fluent in Pushtu as in Punjabi, have told translator Kamaljit Singh Matharu how they watched one of them die in front of his children. Post-mortem tests have so far failed to establish the cause of his death. The dead man has now been identified as Meet Singh Kapoor (40), who was fleeing Afghanistan with his two sons, aged 12 and nine. The nine-year-old boy told the translator how he tried to wake his father, then discovered he was dead. Kapoor’s death has prompted speculation that all other families in the container had only 20 minutes left to live before they too died of suffocation.

Matharu said: “They were 20 minutes from death. They were drifting in and out of consciousness because they had no air. “They were banging on the container every hour in the hope that someone would hear them during the ferry crossing. But no one heard them. It was pitch black, without any air.

It soon became extremely uncomfortable. It was only by good fortune that they were found in time. “I had tears in my eyes. Looking at those kids and how desperate they would have been. Imagine what conditions they must be living in Afghanistan.”

The survivors have told Matharu how they risked their lives to get out of Afghanistan because living conditions for them in Kabul had become intolerable.

“In Kabul they were persecuted,” he said. “Their hair would be pulled and their clothes tugged if they left the house because they were Sikhs.” Only one gurdwara now remains functional in Kabul compared to the eight that existed 40 years ago. And the number of Sikhs left in the whole of Afghanistan is only 3,000 or 800 families.