A Hungarian truck driver has filmed himself intentionally accelerating towards refugees attempting to board lorries outside of Calais, forcing them off the road.
The video, posted on YouTube, shows him swerve towards groups of men as they walk along a three-lane carriageway. Several run into a ditch along the side of the road as he speeds up.
The film, titled Calais Emigrants vs drivers and EUROPA, is more than 14 minutes long and shows dozens of men filling the road in front of the driver, some covering their faces and running towards his lorry.
Five minutes in, after a white lorry passes his vehicle on the right, the driver accelerates and lurches towards the men near the side of the road. He straightens up, then swerves again at another group of men, veering on to the hard shoulder.
One man picks something up and throws it in anger at the driver’s cab. No police are in sight, though later in the video the driver encounters several police cars further up the road.
More than 3,000 comments have been left on the YouTube video, which has been watched more than 2.3m times since it was posted last Wednesday. The driver swears in Hungarian throughout the film, and speaks in disparaging terms about the men he aims his lorry towards.
The video was posted by Á Levente Jeddi, who has seven videos in total on his YouTube channel, detailing his struggles as a lorry driver during the refugee crisis.
He has written several explanations in Hungarian below the latest video, criticising the behaviour of the migrants and refugees but expressing some regret that his actions have reached such a wide audience.
“The video recordings [were] originally made for my friends … [and] does not reflect my real personality, everyone who knows me knows,” he wrote in broken English under the video.
