Police in China’s Hubei province said on Monday that they had confiscated a hand grenade kept by a 90-year-old villager for 20 years as a hammer for everyday use.
The Public Security Bureau of Baokang County posted a video of the grenade’s retrieval. It said the unnamed female villager discovered it in a field decades ago and, believing it to be a lump of iron, had been using it to crack walnuts, hammer nails, and pound pepper.
The grenade was only discovered on Sunday when an old building belonging to the woman in the town of Huangbao was being demolished, according to the post on Weibo, China’s version of X.
It added that police deployed “professional bomb disposal personnel” to her home.
Footage shows two men dressed in T-shirts, long pants, and red hard hats placing the explosive in a bubble wrap sleeve. A uniformed officer assisted them as villagers looked on.
One of the men then appears to secure the ends of the sleeve with Scotch or masking tape.
“Fortunately, this safety hazard has been eliminated and has not caused any harm or injuries,” the Baokang Public Security Bureau wrote.
The police announcement went viral on Weibo, with the topic accruing 75 million views in the 24 hours after the video was posted, per data seen by Business Insider.
The Public Security Bureaus of Baokang and Xiangyang, which is the greater city area, did not immediately respond to requests for comment sent by BI.
Some Weibo users took the reported incident as a testament to the quality of the grenade because it hadn’t exploded after 20 years.
“It’s so obviously a grenade, and no one recognized it. The young didn’t recognize it. The old didn’t recognize it. Have they never seen war?” one top commenter wrote.
In recent years, China has stepped up efforts to publicly encourage its citizens to be vigilant against potential threats as Chinese leader Xi Jinping tries to harden its populace, economy, and military for the possibility of war.
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