BOX OF EXPLOSIVES

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 237, 5 September 1945, Page 5

BOX OF EXPLOSIVES

FOUND ON BEACH. (Press Assn.) GISBORNE, Sept. 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, have apparently been completed withmjt occasion for action being instituted against the person who owned and discarded the case and' its contents. It has been ascertained that tho 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, tnd realising that I 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 tho delay in the. release of the facts.