Found a military flamethrower? Well, pictures of you aiming it at a passing train will be a hit on social networks. And how cool will you look to your friends? That is what four teenagers thought when they did exactly that in the Moscow suburbs.
The pranksters’ show, though, caught the attention of transport police, whose operatives managed to track the youngsters. The 16-17-year-olds appeared to be from Elektrostal, a city in the Moscow region, LifeNews.ru reports on Friday.
The 10th-graders were said to have found their weapon, supposedly a Shmel infantry flamethrower, on one of the nearby military training grounds. The armament was out of use and could not do any harm, except for the psychological shock for those on board the passing train, especially its driver.
The pictures that the teens uploaded show one of them aiming at the passing train. The comments below the photos demonstrate how cynical the young men were in scaring the passengers in such a way.
“We felt relief when the police found the pranksters,” a spokesman for the Moscow Railways told LifeNews, “as we hope it will help them realize all the consequences their photo session may have led to and how cruel it was to those on the train.”
For their thrill-seeking troubles, the four schoolboys may now face criminal prosecution and even jail time.
The Shmel, or Bumblebee, is a portable hand-held rocket launcher (although classified as a flamethrower) produced and exported by Russia and the former Soviet Union. It was a widely-used RPO weapon by the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, and by both Russian and the militants in and near Chechnya.