Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Just an observation

I was reading The Scotsman online this morning and saw this article related to the killing in Nairn of Alistair Wilson. A terrible crime to be sure, but what struck me as interesting, if not a little bit troubling is the fact that the detectives investigating the murder have released details of the murder weapon. A 1920s East German pistol.

What is there to observe I hear you ask? How about the fact that there was no such place as East Germany in the 1920s! It was proclaimed in East Berlin on October 7, 1949 and was fully sovereign from 1954 till the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990.

Sorry to be pedantic, but in my opinion, this is just plain silly. Perhaps naively, I expected that the police would be a bit smarter than that. If their grasp of geography and history is so tenuous, then maybe they aren't the best people to head up a major criminal investigation and might not even be able to find Nairn when the time comes to interview people.

As I said, just an observation...

---End transmission---

3 comments:

Ms Mac said...

You are quite the Authority on a divided Germany all of a sudden! I wonder how that happened?

Mr. Urs said...

Maybe they got the year wrong and meant an East Germanic tribe such as:
* Bastarnae
* Burgundians
* Goths
* Lombards
* Rugians
* Vandals

Anonymous said...

Well observed!