New Zealand’s intelligence agency has released documents confirming that a 17-year-old anti-royalist tried to assassinate the Queen during a visit to Dunedin in 1981 in a mysterious incident that has prompted a fresh police investigation into an alleged “cover up”.

The previously classified documents revealed that Christopher Lewis, a member of a right-wing terror group which he set up with friends, hid in a toilet cubicle on the fifth floor of a building overlooking the Royal Parade in Dunedin, a city on the South Island, on October 14 1981 and fired a single shot with a stolen .22 rifle as the Queen exited her vehicle.

The shot missed and may not have been aimed directly at the Queen, according to a 1997 memo by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service.