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Pistols are restricted weapons under New Zealand law and possessing one requires an additional permit beyond a regular gun license.
The incident took place during Patel’s recent visit to Wellington to open the FBI’s first standalone office in New Zealand. (IMAGE: REUTERS)
FBI Director Kash Patel gave New Zealand’s police and spy bosses gifts of inoperable pistols that were illegal to possess under local gun laws and had to be destroyed, New Zealand law enforcement agencies said.
According to Associated Press, the plastic 3D-printed replica pistols formed part of display stands Patel presented to at least three senior New Zealand security officials on July 31.
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Three of New Zealand’s most powerful law enforcement figures had confirmed that they received the gifts. The three officers were New Zealand’s Police Commissioner Richard Chambers, Andrew Hampton, Director-General of the country’s human intelligence agency NZSIS, and Andrew Clark, Director-General of the technical intelligence agency GCSB.
The incident took place during Patel’s recent visit to Wellington to open the FBI’s first standalone office in New Zealand.
AP quoted a spokesperson for the spy agencies as saying that the gift as “a challenge coin display stand” that included the 3D-printed inoperable weapon “as part of the design”.
“To ensure compliance with firearms laws, I instructed police to retain and destroy them,” Chambers said.
Pistols are restricted weapons under New Zealand law and possessing one requires an additional permit beyond a regular gun license.
AP reported that the law enforcement agencies didn’t specify whether the officials who met with Patel held such permits, but they couldn’t have legally kept the gifts if they didn’t.
Following this, Richard Chambers said the pistols were judged by gun regulators to be potentially operable and were destroyed.
3D-printed weapons are treated the same as other guns in New Zealand. The country had bolstered its gun restrictions following a 2019 white supremacist attack on two mosques in the city of Christchurch, when 51 Muslim worshipers were shot dead by an Australian man who had amassed a cache of semiautomatic weapons legally, AP reported.
New Zealand
October 01, 2025, 03:01 IST
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