Accidental shooting, pt. 2

[lederhosen]

Further updates on Jacob Kovco, the Australian soldier who was shot in Iraq:

* Now being reported that he did not die cleaning his gun. In Brendan Nelson's words: "It was near him in his vicinity and he made some kind of movement which suggests that it discharged."

("Near him in his vicinity"? "Suggests"? Did I hallucinate the five years where Nelson was Minister for Education, before he was promoted to Defence?)

* In an impressive feat of incompetence, they flew the wrong body back to Australia. Officially, Kovco's body is in Kuwait, held up by a public holiday, but his mother is of the not-unreasonable suspicion that if they accidentally flew a dead Bosnian to Australia, maybe her son's body ended up in Bosnia. (She also looks to be about as convinced as I was by the 'accidental shooting' story.)

Comments

[freyaw.livejournal.com]

My favourite is trying to reconcile this:

This morning Dr Nelson said that Private Kovco was in his room with two others at the time of the incident and had his 9mm Browning pistol nearby.

"He was in a room with two of his mates who were doing other things, working on the computer and so on," he said.

with the fact that the weapon would have had the safety off and a round chambered to discharge. I mean, he was in an obviously secured area, where it's kind of against the rules to have a live weapon, right? You don't have a live weapon in your bedroom, right?