An 11-year-old girl has been hospitalised with serious injuries after her brother shot her with a World War Two rifle he had reportedly found in a forest.
Police spokeswoman Aneta Sobieraj told broadcaster RMF FM that they had received a report yesterday that a 14-year-old boy had shot his 11-year-old sister at their home in Borowiny, a small village that lies around halfway between Warsaw and Łódź.
The boy told police that he had found the rifle, which most likely dates to World War Two, in the woods. The shot that hit his sister was fired accidentally while the boy was cleaning the gun, reports RMF.
“I can confirm that an 11-year-old girl suffered serious injuries…[and] was transported to hospital,” Krzysztof Kopania, spokesman for the district prosecutor’s office in Łódź, told Polsat News. “Everything indicates that [the injuries] were caused by a gunshot.”
A 75-year-old British WW2 bomb exploded underwater in Poland as navy divers tried to defuse it.
No one was hurt, as the operation was being done remotely.
The 5.4-tonne Tallboy "earthquake bomb" is the largest unexploded ordnance ever found in Poland pic.twitter.com/FxYMdOX6ai
— Daniel Tilles (@danieltilles1) October 14, 2020
Police and prosecutors are continuing to investigate the incident and the 14-year-old has been detained, according to local newspaper Express Ilustrowany.
Borowiny’s mayor, Sławomir Kołosowski told the newspaper that the community had been left “shaken” by the incident, but that they still “do not really know how it happened”.
Large amounts of munitions from World War Two remain undiscovered around Poland, which was invaded and occupied by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Last year, thousands of residents in the city of Wrocław had to be evacuated after a half-tonne bomb was discovered during construction work.
Main image credit: Halibutt/Wikimedia Commons (under public domain)
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
