Teen finds WWII-era bazooka rocket, brings it to local authorities on his moped
A 16-year-old boy in Austria was at Wallersee, a large lake approximately 10 miles from the city of Salzburg, when he came across something peculiar – an old, rusted object. He picked it up, threw the item in his backpack, and then headed off on his moped to find some police officers. If he knew what he was carrying, however, he wouldn’t have been quite so cavalier. As the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reports, it was a World War II-era anti-tank missile.
The BBC, pointing to a report from Austrian news broadcaster Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), notes that police were alarmed with what the teenager had brought them and immediately handed the projectile over to bomb disposal experts. Fortunately,the weapon couldn’t actually explode. Owen Lamprecht, spokesman for Landespolizeidirektion (Austria’s state police), told The Kronen Zeitung that it couldn’t explode because neither a fuse nor explosives were present.
Still, Lamprecht pointed out that the teen should not have picked it up. He says that in the future, should anybody come across something similar, they should immediately call police and try to keep others away.
More info: BBC, ORF (German), The Kronen Zeitung (German)
