Wednesday 8th September 2004

A German truck driver smashed his lorry into a parked car after wrongly thinking it looked like a getaway vehicle. The 46-year-old from Duisburg then called police and proudly told them he had foiled the crooks’ plot to make a quick getaway by disabling their transport. The man, who admitted later that he ‘may have overreacted’, had spotted the car parked outside a bank at Ohlsdorf in Austria. Instead of getting praise for his actions, the lorry driver was fined the equivalent of £4,000, lost his licence and had to pay for the repairs to his own vehicle.