The Times reports on another hunting accident in France in which a person has been shot dead. A motorist was critically injured when a large calibre rifle bullet passed through his neck as he was driving on the dual carriageway road from Rennes to Nantes. His passenger managed to stop the car and call for help. The police determined that the bullet came from a hunting party of two people who were shooting wild boar near the road. There is widespread anger at these accidents which they believe are caused by reckless shooting and negligence from hunters. A dozen people are accidentally killed by hunters every year in France.
I went online to learn more about this particular accident and was surprised to immediately bump into a very similar story from 2013. In this story a French motorist was killed in what is described as a freakish accident. A hunter shot at a wild boar. The bullet hit the animal but ricocheted off and travelled 2 km across fields, passed through the window of a vehicle and struck the driver in the head. This accident took place in the Oise department of northern France. The victim’s wife was in the car at the time and she managed to take control of the vehicle and successfully avoided a line of trees before the car came to a stop in a nearby field. She was found by firefighters in shock and taken to hospital. The president of the local hunters’ federation, Guy Harlé d’Ophove, told Europe 1 radio that such an accident is “unheard of”.
Fast forward eight years and it is no longer unheard of. People are still mystified as to how the bullet ricocheted off the boar and travelled so far. You wonder whether it actually happened like that. It seems highly unlikely. Perhaps, and I’m being highly speculative, the driver was shot by another hunter and they protected him. Or this is a case of murder. You’ve got to admit that if it was murder, it was a brilliant way to cover it up.
SOME MORE ON HUNTING:
