A 26-year-old woman has suffered serious injuries after a runaway truck landed on her car in the South African city of Port Elizabeth.

The truck driver had parked the vehicle while he picked up his children from the Parsons Hill primary school, police said.

It rolled down the hill, smashing into the car from above.

The woman's Opel Adam was virtually flattened, leaving her trapped inside for nearly 40 minutes.

Emergency services eventually pulled her out, reports said.

The woman survived but was taken to hospital with multiple injuries, including fractures, paramedics said.

Paramedics from independent ambulance company Netcare 911 were among those to respond to the accident on Tuesday afternoon.

"The truck was squashing both her and her car. Parts of it had to be cut off in order to free her," Shawn Herbst, a spokesman for Netcare 911, told the BBC.

The truck driver, who has not been named, is being investigated for reckless and negligent driving, police said.

"When he returned to his truck, he noticed it was no longer parked where he had left it," police spokeswoman Sandra Janse van Rensburg told local newspaper HeraldLive.

"He then noticed that the truck had rolled forward and collided with an Opel Adam."

source: BBC