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Police force fined £40k over civilian shot in classroom
Paul Cheston, Courts Correspondent24 Sep 2009
A police force was fined £40,000 today after one of its firearms instructors accidentally shot and nearly killed a former rifle marksman.
Pc David Micklethwaite, who had failed a gun training course, mistakenly loaded a Magnum .44 revolver with a live round from an old Quality Street tin — a practice the judge branded a “disaster waiting to happen”.
The 52-year-old then pulled the trigger while pointing it at a civilian colleague during a tutorial. He was fined £8,000.
The bullet hit control room employee Keith Tilbury, 51, at Thames Valley constabulary headquarters in Kidlington, Oxfordshire, and caused devastating injuries, Southwark crown court heard.
Mr Tilbury, a phone operator who used to shoot for Britain in the Berkshire county rifle team, underwent five hours of life-saving surgery for an “exploded” bowel and kidney, as well as lung and liver damage.
He was unconscious for 12 days and has still not returned to work.
Both Thames Valley police and Micklethwaite, who were also ordered to pay £25,000 and £8,000 costs respectively, admitted breaching health and safety rules.
The tin, whose contents were not subject to inventory, was not marked and contained a mixture of “inert, pulled and live rounds”.
Judge Nicholas Loraine-Smith said: “The inherent danger in such a system is glaringly obvious.
“There was nothing to indicate this tin contained live ammunition and there was no certain way of knowing whether rounds were live or not.”
