Bold gendarmes shoot Air Austral's new 777

Police on the French overseas territory of Reunion have managed to bring a counter-hijacking exercise to a truly Clouseau-esque conclusion by, er, accidentally shooting the aeroplane.

Not an inexpensive aeroplane, either, but one of Air Austral's brand-new Boeing 777-300ERs, identified in this local report as F-ONOU (and doesn't that seem oddly appropriate?)

If you don't parler le francais, the story goes that the GPIOM gendarmerie was conducting a hostage-rescue training session yesterday which normally involves using blank ammunition.

For reasons which have yet to be explained, however, one of the weapons was carrying at least one bullet of 'the exploding kind' and, as a result, the aircraft is out of service with a window of the broken kind.