Wakayama cop loses fully-loaded automatic handgun on the street while guarding PM

We all have our bad days at work, some worse than others.

A Wakayama Prefectural Police officer in his 20s landed himself in hot water earlier this week when he accidentally dropped his fully-loaded automatic pistol out of the window of his moving police car. The weapon came loose from his uniform while he was leaning out of the patrol car’s side window.

A little before 8 p.m. on the evening of 14 September, in Wakayama City, the officer was in a vehicle heading down a main road. Suddenly another car was about to pull out from a side street. In an effort to stop the car, the officer stuck the upper half of his body out the window to signal to the vehicle to wait. However, in doing so he knocked his weapon off and it tumbled onto the road.

▼ News report showing where the gun was lost

When the officer noticed the gun had gone missing, a team of 50 cops was assembled and scoured the streets for it. However, by this time, a local man walking by had already spotted the pistol and picked it up. He then promptly turned it in to the nearest police station as a lost item.

Although it’s probably an incident that could happen to anyone with a deadly weapon and a message to convey from a moving vehicle, people were still surprised about it.

“Some wild stuff going on in Wakayama!”
“Scary. What if some maniac had picked it up?”
“Thankfully it wasn’t used for any crime.”
“If it were me, I wouldn’t have told anyone I dropped it.”
“This guy will probably have to resign.”
“At first I thought he did it on purpose. How do you accidentally lose a gun?!”

By the way, the reason the officer leaned out the window to stop that other car was that he was part of a motorcade protecting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who was leaving a campaign rally in the city. Strangely, none of the comments seemed all too concerned with the fact that this all happened while guarding their head of government.

The fate of the officer hasn’t been reported yet, but it would seem he doesn’t have the brightest of futures on the force at this point.

Still, it’s probably a good thing this happened in one of the safer areas of a country notorious for it’s honest citizenry, and it’s especially lucky it happened later at night when kids were less likely to be around too. I suppose the lesson here is, you know, not to drop loaded guns on the street…? Though that really shouldn’t have to be a lesson.

Source: TV Asahi News, Hachima Kiko,
Top image: Pakutaso (Edited by SoraNews24)

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