BOX OF EXPLOSIVES

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 57, 5 September 1945, Page 9

BOX OF EXPLOSIVES

RESULT OF INQUIRY

P.A. GISBORNE, September 4. Police inquiries into the finding of a case of explosives on the Waikanae beach, picked up. by a resident and taken to his home, has apparently been completed without occasion for action being instituted ' against the person who owned and discarded the case and its contents. It has been ascertained that the person concerned is a returned serviceman with a fine record of service, and the police view of his action is that it was done without any criminal intent. The case contained several plugs of explosive, some of enemy-country origin and some of British manufacture, packed round a chamber formed by a tin which had contained a commercial product and which appeared to be an arming device. Wires led from this chamber to an ignition set in which detonators were involved, and the removal of these wires was the first safety precaution .taken. Explosives experts concluded that it was an Army device of a bellows type, used in sabotage against aircraft. The Army Department summoned bomb disposal experts from Palmerston North to dismantle it, and the police traced the ownership to a Hawke's Bay resident who had made it for his own purposes, and realising that it might cause more damage than he expected, he dismantled it, brought it to Gisborne, reassembled it, and threw it in the river, but the tide turned and washed it ashore. Naval censorship is partly responsible for the delay in the release of the facts.