Unseasonably early and heavy snow blanketing northern Europe caused widespread travel disruptions Saturday, with hundreds of flights cancelled and many passengers left stranded in airports, according to dpa. In Britain, the busiest airports - London's Heathrow and Gatwick - shut their runways to flights in what is traditionally one of the most travelled days of the year, the final Saturday before Christmas. Around 15 centimetres of snow fell on the capital on Saturday alone. Four out of six scheduled Premiership football games also had to be postponed due to the snow. However, Britain's Prince Harry managed to fly into a snowbound Berlin for a charity awards dinner despite the travel chaos. At Amsterdam's Schipol airport, one of Europe's major transcontinental flight hubs, up to 3,000 stranded passengers slept overnight Friday to Saturday in the terminal buildings. "The airport had put up 1,700 camp beds and other people slept on chairs and benches," a spokesman said. There were similar scenes at Munich airport, where around 200 passengers spent the night after flights were cancelled or delayed. Hungary's Budapest airport, where temperatures reached minus 15, was closed. Although Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport remained opened, around 15 per cent of flights were cancelled there. At Frankfurt airport - another major international hub - police had to be called in after frustrated Lufthansa passengers with delayed flights threatened to face up to new passengers arriving and tried to join their check-in queue. The airport said it was managing to keep its runways clear of ice, but many planes could not take off because airports at several key European destinations, including in Croatia and Italy, were shut. Temperatures across northern Europe on Saturday ranged from a high of around minus 6 in Paris to lows of minus 20 in Belgrade and in Scotland, several degrees colder than usual for mid-December. In Italy, at least three people died in snow-related incidents in a space of just 24 hours, news reports said. The victims comprised a driver whose truck overturned in a highway mass pile-up, a man who suffered a heart-attack shovelling snow and a homeless man who froze to death. Hundreds of cars were also stalled near Florence after a jack-knifed truck blocked a highway. In Britain, hundreds of motorists spent the night stranded on a motorway in Lancashire after a similar truck accident. In some parts of north-west England, more than 20 centimetres of fresh snow had fallen in the past night - the heaviest snowfall in 25 years. The country's motoring organisations warned drivers to stay at home. The Automobile Association (AA) said it had received 18,000 calls for breakdowns and stuck cars - more than double its usual tally for a Saturday. The snow has caused the most disruptions in countries that had only done low-level preparations for a harsh winter.
