Man with ‘Taser’ is held at palace gates

A MAN was arrested at Buckingham Palace yesterday on suspicion of possessing an electric stun gun.

The suspect, aged 38, was detained by civilian security staff at the visitors’ entrance at lunchtime.

Metropolitan Police officers were called and the man was arrested on suspicion of possessing a firearm.

A police spokesman said the weapon was a ‘Taser’, the brand name for distinctive electric stun guns carried by police in the US and UK.

It is understood that there was no confrontation and the weapon was not brandished at anyone.

The Queen and Prince Philip are at Balmoral Castle in Scotland as their summer break nears an end. Buckingham Palace declined to comment.

Electric stun guns are classified as firearms under UK legislation, and there is a minimum five-year jail term for those caught with them.

Every year foreign visitors are arrested with stun guns disguised as mobile phones, torches and even lipsticks as these can be purchased easily overseas. Most are oblivious to the fact the weapons are illegal in the UK.

In the past there have been more severe security scares at the palace.

Most famously, in 1982, Michael Fagan evaded guards to get inside the Queen’s private chambers while she was still in bed. The unemployed father- of-four, then 31, spent around ten minutes talking to the Queen after he climbed over the palace walls and up a drainpipe.

The Queen managed to raise the alarm when Fagan asked for a cigarette, allowing her to call for a footman who held him until police arrived.

In February 2013, police used a Taser stun gun on a man who was wielding two knives outside the palace.

Talhat Rehman, then 54, broke from a crowd of tourists in the middle of the Changing of the Guard ceremony, holding one blade to his own chest and another to his throat. As an officer tried to intervene, Rehman lunged at him and was shot with the stun gun, before being arrested and taken away in a police van.

He later pleaded guilty to two counts of having a knife in public.

And in 2016 a former soldier obsessed with the Queen was caught just yards from the palace with three knives and a garotte wire. Ex-Grenadier Guardsman John Bolton, 48, who was wearing an SAS beret, told police he was working for Her Majesty and Prince Philip. He was locked up indefinitely under a mental health order.