I'm part of an on-site policing team of five officers and we're lucky to have a unique job in the Metropolitan Police - providing policing support to the huge construction site of the Olympic Park, Olympic Village and surrounding developments. Everything about it is new territory for us - from the equipment we need, to the training, specialist skills and construction industry knowledge.

Our days are always different - it's fascinating to watch the site changing from one day to the next and the speed of delivery that's happening before our eyes.

I'm usually called in circumstances that you wouldn't find in every day policing. Just recently we were called to the Aquatics Centre site because the contractors found rusty firearms in a bag while widening and improving the Waterworks River.

A finding of guns in an East End river conjures up sinister questions but rather than jump to conclusions, the Met's firearms team inspected the guns after making them safe and provided fascinating clues about their past and possibly their owner.

Of the five articles found, one's a replica gun, two are single shot rifles and two are sawn off barrels. All are too rusty for forensic opportunities:



The picture shows (from the top), two barrels that don't match up with the other guns. The first gun is a .22 single shot rifle, known as an original JGA Karabiner, and appears to be German-made. This type of gun would be used for hunting small mammals and target practice. Next is again a .22 rifle, a Stevens single shot Schuetzen rifle. It would be used for similar purposes as a small calibre rifle (ie: small bullets).

Both of these rifles have been sawn off but have been done in a way that has damaged the internal mechanism. Our experts think the owner did this prior to getting rid of the guns so they couldn’t be used again.

The find that is most interesting as it appears intact is a 'Colt Single Action Army' handgun, the type you see in western movies. Luckily on this occasion it's a replica imitation blank firer ie: it's been made to make a 'bang' but nothing is fired as the barrel has been filled:
 


Why did the owner dispose of the guns into the river? Well, according to our specialists the guns were available around the time of the war, making them possibly over 50 years old. The Firearms Act introduced in 1968 made it compulsory for owners to register their gun. One explanation is that the owner dumped his collection so he didn't have to register them.

So hopefully our owner is a gun enthusiast into target shooting or a collector with no sinister motivations, but we will never know.