KEY POINTS:
A Palmerston North police firearms instructor will be disciplined after one of his trainees fired a gun in the city's police station.
The officer was being trained in the use of a newly issued semi-automatic .223 known as the M4 Bushmaster, the Manawatu Standard reported today.
The bullet penetrated an internal wall, flew over the head of an officer sitting in the next office, smashed through an outside window and disintegrated.
Acting city police chief Peter Thurston denied it was a narrow miss but said any accidental discharge of a gun was bad news.
There was an internal investigation into the incident - believed to have occurred in November - and the instructor would be disciplined.
Mr Thurston said it was a mystery of how a live round came to be in the gun the police officer was handling as it should have been loaded with blank bullets.
The policeman involved in the incident was one of a group of about three who was doing transition training because he wasn't on duty when the new guns were introduced, replacing a bolt-action .223 weapon.
The instructor had loaded the magazine so the presence of a live round was his responsibility.
Mr Thurston said as a result of the incident, police throughout the country were told to inspect and audit their drill rounds to make sure no live bullets got into the process elsewhere.
The location of such training in the station is now being looked at so that in the unlikely event of anything like it happening again, nobody would be at risk, he said.
- NZPA
