Young man saves children from grenade explosion

Two boys were playing football with a grenade

Pavel Kopytov, 22-year-old Murmansk region resident was coming back home one evening. He stopped near a house to talk to his friend. When he turned his head he saw two teenage boys walking along the road, kicking a grenade in front of them.

”My hair stood on end. I thought they would kick the grenade once again and it would explode. I yelled at them, but they continued tossing it up carelessly. I rushed to them and grabbed the grenade. I could see it was old and rusty, but a friend of mine lost his finger because of a cartridge a while ago. So I was aware of the possible ending of such a 'game of football,' Pavel told the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

As it turned out, two 14-year-old boys Yury and Egor found the grenade in the woods, picking mushrooms. “We only saw the top of it sticking out of the ground. I saw it when I was reaching out for a mushroom,” Egor said. “I carefully took it out. We recognized a grenade at once,” the boy said.

Pavel brought the dangerous finding home and called the police. A group of specialists arrived very quickly. It was a decades-old German M-39 grenade, which could blast at any moment.

”The police told me I should not have brought the grenade home. But what else could I do? If I had left it alone in the street, the guys would have played with it again. Who knows what would happen,” Pavel said.