Policeman fined €4,000 for accidental shooting during unauthorised exercise

Policeman Shawn Asciak has been fined €4,000 for the accidental shooting of a colleague during an unauthorised exercise in the ruins of the White Rocks complex in 2009. The policeman, along with another five colleagues, had taken part in the exercise organised by a police sergeant who had just attended a course in law enforcement run by the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service. The sergeant took his colleagues to the desolate White Rocks Complex at about 3 p.m. to "show them what he had learnt". At the time, the policemen were all supposed to be duty and the three police cars they drove had been pulled from their routine patrols without official authorisation. They practised how to approach robbers inside a building at the dilapidated complex when a shot was fired and 41-year-old constable Peter Sammut was hit in the chest. His colleagues gave him first aid until an ambulance arrived to take him to hospital, where he was found to be badly, but not critically, wounded. The colleague whose pistol had gone off, and who has not been in the force for long, was treated for severe shock. In today's sentence, the court found that this was certainly not a case of attempted murder and...