A man who allegedly\u00a0doused the front door of a Dunedin police station in petrol and set it alight overnight filmed the scene before calling police to report the crime.<\/p>\n
Senior Sergeant Anthony Bond, of Dunedin, said a 32-year-old man used petrol as an accelerant to set the locked front entrance of the Dunedin Central Police Station on fire, about 4.40am today.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018He’s gone across the road and filmed it and then called police to let us know that he’s done it,\u2019\u2019 Snr Sgt Bond said.<\/p>\n
The man was arrested and will appear in the Dunedin District Court this morning, facing charges of wilful damage and arson.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018His explanation is he wants to go back to prison.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
The fire was extinguished by staff and no injuries were reported.<\/p>\n
Later this morning, carpet and tiles at the front entrance were singed and the entranceway still smelt strongly of petrol.<\/p>\n
Snr Sgt Bond said there had been potential for injuries to staff and prisoners in the building and further damage.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018Particularly when you’re pouring petrol as well, anywhere, let alone the possible self-inflicted injuries with pouring petrol and getting it on your hands or shoes and setting yourself alight too.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Damage of this type to the police station was rare, he said.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018It’s concerning in that this was fire rather than people being frustrated and kicking a window when departing sort of thing.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man who allegedly\u00a0doused the front door of a Dunedin police station in petrol and set it alight…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":129594,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-129593","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}