A British lorry driver filming illegal migrants attempting to break into another vehicle was left bloody and bruised when they smashed his windows and attacked him on the road near Calais, France.
“I could sense someone trying to get into the lorry. I looked down and within seconds there were 15 of them laughing at me. The next minute I hear someone hit the truck and the second after that, the whole passenger window caves in,” recalled the victim, 57-year-old Andy Couper.
“They all try to jump into the cab. I drive off slowly with my hand on the horn to attract attention to anyone in the area. But there are no police. Another brick came through and I managed to drive off slowly and they started to attack the truck behind me,” Mr Couper told the Telegraph newspaper, which published a picture of the driver’s bloodied face following the attack.
The migrants did not manage to infiltrate the driver’s lorry, according to heartbeat monitors which examined the vehicle once he reached port, but he said that a fellow haulier’s truck was found to be hosting “something like a Butlins’ Holiday Camp, there were loads of migrants in there”.
“They are just running riot around Calais,” he lamented.
While the issue of illegal aliens stowing away in heavy goods vehicles bound for Britain and sometimes attacking their drivers is not new, it has in recent months been driven down the news agenda by the comparatively new phenomenon of large-scale, record-breaking arrivals via small boat, which the Conservative government has been failing to curb since 2018.
It is by no means a small issue, however, with the issue becoming so bad that the Road Haulage Associaton (RHA) industry body has begged the French government to deploy military forces to bring the area under control.
Some drivers have come off significantly worse than Mr Couper over the years, with the first reported fatality coming in June 2017 when a van driver was killed after crashing into a trap migrants had laid across the road in order to slow down larger vehicles so they could board them.
The killing had been anticipated for some time, with another driver having had an extremely close brush with death when a migrant hurled a wooden stake through the front window of his lorry cab like a javelin in 2015, missing him only narrowly.
Just weeks after the 2017 killing a driver was knocked unconscious by migrants who smashed a brick into his head and hijacked his vehicle, and a year after that a driver was threatened with a chainsaw, among many other incidents.
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