A GRANDFATHER spent three days driving around southern England, before he was found on Christmas Day, after his wife's flight was switched from Heathrow airport to Gatwick airport during last week's travel chaos.

Mohammed Bellazrak, 72, is believed to have clocked up nearly 2000 miles (3218km) as he desperately tried to find his way home after dropping off his wife at Gatwick on December 23.

What should have been a 120-mile (193km) journey lasting two-and-a-half hours became a 66-hour marathon. Mr Bellazrak ended up sleeping in his car before trying again and again to work out his route back to Trowbridge in Wiltshire.

He was eventually found on Christmas Day, still at the wheel of his Peugeot 307, when he triggered a police camera armed with number plate recognition and was flagged down.

Mr Bellazrak had driven his wife to Heathrow and then to Gatwick so that she could catch a flight to visit her family in Morocco. CCTV footage showed him leaving Gatwick at 8.00pm Thursday but he disappeared after that.

After his family contacted police, Thames Valley Police fed his car details into the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) computer and discovered that he had been in numerous towns including Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire.

Sergeant Jo Spencer, who led the hunt, said: “We contacted other forces with no success and then asked for the automatic number plate recognition systems to be activated to see if anyone spotted his car. We were surprised to discover that ANPR cameras had recorded him in Bracknell, Wokingham, Burnham and High Wycombe - all presumably attempts at finding his way from Gatwick to Wiltshire."

His ordeal finally ended at 2.00pm on Christmas Day when his car number plate activated an ANPR camera in a patrol car in Oxford.

Mr Bellazrak, who had left his mobile phone at home, said: “Three times I went to London and three times I went back to the airport.

“I was a little bit frightened because I would stop and ask for directions but nobody would give me any. They would just say that they didn’t know where I was going or I was going too far away. I had my sat-nav but I was still lost. It kept on taking me all over the place.

“I will never go out without my mobile phone again. I blame my sat-nav for what happened.”