Peru 10 year-old girl killed playing with hand grenade
AYACUCHO, Peru (AP) – A 10 year-girl was killed when she accidentally detonated a hand grenade she had found near her home in Peru’s central Andes, police said yesterday.
Dolores Villanueva was a few metres (yards) from her house in the village of Chillicopampa when she found two hand grenades Sunday morning in a plastic bag, police said.
She was playing with the weapons when one exploded, blowing off her left arm and right leg and killing her instantly.
The Huanta district, where the girl lived, was the epicentre of guerrilla violence during the 1980s and 1990s.
Discarded hand grenades from those years are common in Peru. Leading newspaper El Comercio reported last month that anti-terrorism police found and disarmed 700 of the weapons in 2004 in the coastal capital, Lima, 330 kilometres (205 miles) northwest of Ayacucho.
