Dorset Cops Send Granny Machine Gun in Post

A grandmother from Dorset was shocked to discover a parcel sent to her by mistake contained a police sub machine gun.

Catherine Roots, who is in her 50s, had been expecting a horse harness to be delivered to her home.

But when she opened her package, Mrs Roots was terrified to discover that it contained a Heckler & Koch sub-machine gun.

She said last week: ‘I get a lot of packages and I signed for it thinking it was a harness for one of my horses.

‘I just plonked it down and didn’t think about it, but when I later opened it up I was terrified. You don’t expect something like that to arrive.

‘I didn’t touch it; I didn’t know if it would go off. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I found a letter underneath it addressed to the Dorset Police firearms unit with the correct address.

‘I don’t blame the police, but whoever sent it must have seen that they were delivering it to a private address. They made a mistake with the postcode and somebody really ought to be taken to task.’

She added: ‘If it had got into the wrong hands, the consequences wouldn’t bear thinking about.’

Dorset Police later explained the blunder had occurred after suppliers misspelled their postcode sending the package to the wrong address.

Assistant Chief Constable Adrian Whiting apologised to Mrs Roots and claimed the weapon was a training gun only capable of firing infra-red beams. He said: ‘The item is perfectly safe and can’t cause anyone any harm.’