Family car attached to lorry in freak accident

A family of four had a terrifying ride back home from a day’s shopping in Germany when their car’s towbar got wedged under a lorry bumper in a freak accident, the Telegraaf reported at the weekend.

The driver of the lorry did not realise he had hit the car, nor that it was stuck, and drove along the A7 in the north of the country for at least five km, pushing the Peugeot 106 in front of it.
The family – Sjoerd Bekkema, Hilda Nijholt and their two children Arjan (7) and Anouk (8) – shouted and tried to warn the lorry driver, who drove on unaware of their plight.
‘The children were in the back and terrified. So was I. I hooted the horn like a madman and opened my window and waved but he just did not see us and I could not get free,’ Bekkema told the paper. ‘We were being swung from left to right and I could see us being squashed up against another big lorry in front of us.’
Eventually, a jerk on the steering wheel freed the Peugeot from the lorry and the driver realised what had happened. The family, who live in Drachten, were taken to hospital with neck and back pains but released the same night.
The driver’s employer, Den Hartogh, declined to talk to the Telegraaf about the incident.