HOT OFF THE PRESS!!!!!!!!!!!!
HOW GROUSE IS THIS STORY FOR US EH? AND SHE IS A "VERY GOOD SHOT" HOW ABOUT WE SEND THIS TO HUGH (SPEW) WIRTH AND OTHERS EH?

Home > World News > Article
Dame Kiri triggers gun drama
By Auslan Cramb
Edinburgh
December 7, 2003

Print this article
Email to a friend

Dramatic entrances are the stock-in-trade of the opera singer Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, but the flap caused by her arrival at a Glasgow hotel must have surprised even her.

The soprano unwittingly spread consternation among staff at the Holiday Inn when she asked to be directed to the hotel's "gun store", where she would like to store her firearms during her stay.

Even if Glasgow was recently identified as the "murder capital" of Britain, its hotels are not normally asked by guests to store guns.

The manager told Dame Kiri, 59, that he would have to contact the police to let them know there were firearms on the premises, and two officers arrived quickly. They found the singer and her companion had two shotguns with them, which they planned to use on a Scottish shooting holiday.

In other parts of the world, a guest who asks for the gun store would not be regarded as having made a strange request. But Dame Kiri was told that very few urban hotels in Britain offered the service. The police checked her firearms licence, and when they found everything was in order asked her to accompany them to a nearby police station.

advertisement

advertisement

She deposited the shotguns there for safekeeping and, after breakfast at the hotel on Wednesday, returned to the station to collect them. Dame Kiri's agent said she was now enjoying a shooting break in the Scottish hills.

An enthusiastic country sportswoman, and an expert clay pigeon shooter, she has frequented a shooting school at Gleneagles Hotel in the past. A member of staff yesterday described her as "very good shot".

- Telegraph