School evacuated after 11-year-old girl took World War II hand grenade to show-and-tell

A school in Australia was evacuated after an 11-year-old girl took a hand grenade to show-and-tell. A police bomb squad removed the device and cordoned off the area around the school after the girl turned up at a morning class with the grenade, which did not have a pin. Police said the girl's family thought it was a dummy.

The grenade has been taken for examination by Defense Force munitions experts but is believed to have been an inactive device, possibly from the First World War. The school's headmaster, Boyd Allen, said the girl's teacher brought the grenade to him and he immediately evacuated the 450 students and 60 teachers and called the police. "I wasn't sure if it was a dummy and I didn't want to take that chance," he said.

Mr Allen, from the Hunter Christian School in Newcastle, said the girl would not be punished. "She's bewildered, embarrassed – I tried to make her aware she's not in trouble,'' he said.  "She's a sweet young lady from a lovely family. She understood it to be a dummy hand grenade that had been deactivated, there was no firing pin, just the body of the grenade. It was heavy, but I assume practice grenades would weigh that much too."


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Police said the device had been inspected by Defense Force experts, who took it for testing and would probably destroy it. "There's no doubt that it did pose a potential threat and the actions we've had today are appropriate in the circumstances," said Police Inspector Gerard Lawson.  "In a classroom, certainly if it was live and it was a fully functioning device it would cause serious injuries to all the occupants."