Swiss accidentally invade Liechtenstein

petrym
petrym Posts: 1,912
edited March 2007 in The Clubhouse
ZURICH, Switzerland - What began as a routine training exercise almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident after a company of Swiss soldiers got lost at night and marched into neighboring Liechtenstein.

According to Swiss daily Blick, the 170 infantry soldiers wandered just over a mile across an unmarked border into the tiny principality early Thursday before realizing their mistake and turning back.

A spokesman for the Swiss army confirmed the story but said that there were unlikely to be any serious repercussions for the mistaken invasion.

"We've spoken to the authorities in Liechtenstein and it's not a problem," Daniel Reist told The Associated Press.

Officials in Liechtenstein also played down the incident.

Interior ministry spokesman Markus Amman said nobody in Liechtenstein had even noticed the soldiers, who were carrying assault rifles but no ammunition. "It's not like they stormed over here with attack helicopters or something," he said.

Liechtenstein, which has about 34,000 inhabitants and is slightly smaller than Washington DC, doesn't have an army.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070302/ap_on_fe_st/mistaken_invasion


Even Barney Fife was better armed :D
Post edited by petrym on

Comments

  • cfrizz
    cfrizz Posts: 13,415
    edited March 2007
    OOOPS! It looks like somebody doesn't know how to read a compass!:D
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  • dorokusai
    dorokusai Posts: 25,577
    edited March 2007
    I be suprised if they even use a real compass anymore, so they should be extra embarassed.
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  • shack
    shack Posts: 11,154
    edited March 2007
    When I saw that headline on my homepage....I immediately thought of the movies "The Mouse That Roared" and "Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came?"
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  • dragon1952
    dragon1952 Posts: 4,899
    edited March 2007
    We ran across some Swiss soldiers with rifles while camping in Switzerland one time. We were hiking and came around a corner and they were walking right towards us. We were freaked bigtime because we had no idea whose property we might have been on. They looked like **** SS to us. We were like 'Oh ****!' They probably didn't have any ammo either though. They just walked right by us without saying a word.
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  • Bill Ayotte
    Bill Ayotte Posts: 1,860
    edited March 2007
    A dead GPS is a useless GPS......Too bad they don't actually teach land nav anymore.