HIGH winds battered Europe today, killing at least four people in three countries, grounding flights, halting trains, ripping roofs off buildings and flipping over lorries.

Falling trees killed two 62-year-old men in the Netherlands, a woman south of the Belgian capital of Brussels and a 59-year-old man at a camping site in the German town of Emmerich, near the Dutch border.

Police spokeswoman Jose Albers told Dutch national broadcaster NOS that authorities were also investigating whether the powerful gusts were to blame for the death of a 66-year-old man who fell through a perspex roof in the central town of Vuren.