A major security blunder has shaken London’s law enforcement community after armed protection officers assigned to guard Mayor Sadiq Khan accidentally left a cache of loaded weapons unsecured on a public street in the capital’s south end, triggering an urgent internal investigation. As of this week, five serving officers have been reassigned away from frontline protection duties while the probe into the incident moves forward, Metropolitan Police officials confirmed in an official statement released late Friday.
The stockpile of weapons, which British tabloid newspaper The Sun has reported includes a Heckler & Koch MP5 semiautomatic carbine, a Glock service pistol, a Taser conducted energy weapon and a quantity of live ammunition, was discovered completely unattended by a local civilian couple earlier this Tuesday. The pair stumbled on the unmarked bag left along the curb before alerting police to the dangerous oversight.
Jordan Griffiths, a scaffolder who was with his girlfriend when the bag was found, told reporters he was utterly stunned when he opened the bag and realized what it held. “I could not believe my eyes,” Griffiths said in an interview with The Sun. “I took some pictures as proof of what we had found, then I called the police right away and told them what I had. They turned up within a few minutes to collect the guns.”
The Metropolitan Police’s Directorate of Professional Standards, the unit tasked with overseeing officer conduct and investigating procedural errors, is leading the review into how such a critical lapse in security protocol occurred. In the unit’s public statement, leaders acknowledged the public alarm the incident is likely to spark. “We are urgently reviewing the circumstances of this incident and recognize the concern it may cause,” the statement read. “At this stage it is believed the bag was misplaced by on-duty officers a short time before the member of the public located it.”
A representative for Mayor Sadiq Khan said that while the incident does not pose an ongoing threat to the mayor, law enforcement leadership must take every possible measure to prevent similar dangerous oversights from happening in the future. “The police must now take all steps to ensure an incident like this never occurs again,” the spokesperson said.