A dramatic gun battle broke out between the German police and the armed forces after a blunder led them to mistake troops for heavily armed criminals.
Cops fired some 30 shots at the military – mistaking them for a threat – resulting in one soldier being struck in the face and airlifted to hospital.
Officials are now urgently investigating what caused the catastrophic ‘miscommunication failure’ that resulted in police officers firing live ammunition at soldiers.
The incident occurred last Wednesday in the town of Erding, northeast of Munich, when cops received a report of a ‘man with a long gun’, according to Bavarian police.
Officers, who were unaware that the armed forces had been deployed for a military exercise, sent out an armed response unit, patrol cars and a helicopter.
When police arrived at the scene, the soldiers participating in the ‘Marshal Power’ exercise believed they were posing as ‘hostiles’ in the drill and fired practice ammunition at them.
Cops responded with live ammunition, which resulted in one soldier being shot in the face.
‘We are now intensively examining where the communication broke down,’ a police spokesperson told the German press agency dpa.
File photo: Volunteer reservist soldiers shoot Heckler & Koch G36 rifles as they train near the Clausewitz-Kaserne barracks on October 23, 2024 in Nienburg, Germany
The solder, who was participating in a drill simulating combat during wartime, was airlifted to hospital, but was not seriously injured, according to local media.
Reasons for the mix-up are unclear, but according to German newspaper Bild, when local police received reports of an armed man, they called the armed forces to check whether they had started conducting their scheduled practice drills.
The person who answered the phone reportedly told police that the exercise was not due to begin until the next day, leading cops to believe they were dealing with a serious incident.
‘Due to a misinterpretation at the scene, shots were fired,’ the Bavarian police said in a statement.
‘It later transpired that the person carrying a weapon was a member of the German armed forces, who was on site as part of an exercise,’ the statement added.
The Bavarian state criminal police and prosecutors in Landshut have opened an investigation into the gunfight.
Officials are examining why the local police were unaware of the exercise, even though some cops from other forces were also taking part.
‘It was a communication failure,’ a police spokesperson said.
According to Bild, the government of Upper Bavaria in July had forwarded an email from the German military which included the details of the exercise to the Erding District Office.
The District Office had promised to forward the information to the city of Erdig.
The drills were reportedly being conducted in several Bavarian towns and cities to rehearse for an attack on a NATO member state amid amid growing threats from Russia.
This is not the first time military practice drills have gone wrong.
In 2023, British soldiers riding in a Warrior armoured vehicle accidentally unleashed a barrage of live rounds at Challenger 2 tank during a training exercise mishap.
Troops riding in the heavily-armed 25-tonne military fighter raked the tank with six shots from its armour-piercing 30mm cannon.
The Warrior crew mistook the Challenger 2 for an ‘enemy tank’ after spotting it through a thermal scope 1,640ft away during an ‘intense’ live-fire drill.
A team of gunners in the Warrior reportedly performed an ’emergency shoot’, firing the armoured vehicle’s cannons on fully automatic, emptying the weapon system’s magazine.
Fortunately, the Warrior’s Rarden cannon was loaded with inert practice rounds instead of high-explosive or armour piercing ones normally used in combat.
Five rounds smashed into the tank’s world-beating armour and bounced off.
Nobody was hurt in the blunder at Castlemartin range in Pembrokeshire, which saw troops from The Royal Welsh regiment training with the Royal Tank Regiment ahead of their deployment to Estonia to defend Nato’s eastern flank from Russia.
Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former tank commander in the British Army, said such instances are disturbingly common in the military.
