By Jenny Suo
One of the best known names in Kiwi music is a little red faced tonight after mistakingly thinking he'd stumbled into a fatal shooting and tweeting about it.
Che Fu announced that a man had been shot in Mangere, when police were dealing with a bomb scare which turned out to be just a suitcase.
It follows a similar situation in Sydney where a teenager had a suspected bomb strapped to her neck for 10 hours.
There was no bomb, but what did go off was Twitter, when a Kiwi musician thought he'd stumbled into a shooting. This evening he apologised for the mistake.
“In hindsight I think that might not have been the wisest thing, to those involved, I’m sorry, I did not want to mis-lead anyone, that’s not my thing,” he says.
He was speaking at a school nearby when he became affected by the police cordon.
He tweeted that a man had just been shot outside and that a guy with a gun was still on the loose. Then he said the Armed Offenders Squad had locked down the campus and ‘it was surreal’.
A few minutes later, he corrected his mistake. Police say the tweets caused a frenzy of misinformation and they're now looking at new procedures to speed up getting facts to the public.
Speed was no factor in a bomb scare in Sydney either. For 10 hours 18-year-old Madelaine Pulver thought her life could end at any minute after a man in a balaclava entered her home and chained a device around her neck.
Her parents could only wait as police tried painstakingly to remove it safely. Today they praised their daughter for her courage.
William and Belinda Pulver are multi-millionaires and it's believed the offender was trying to extort money from Madelaine's father.
The device was the size of a small briefcase or shoe box and advice was sought from the British military.
Finally the device was cracked.
Seasoned officers say they've never seen anything like it before in Australia.
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