Police searching for 'dead body' spotted being wheeled across university campus find it was a DUMMY used to teach student nurses

' Body ' was mannequin to train student nurses how to face an emergency

Publican shown CCTV footage convinced he was looking at a dead body



Hospital moving dummy admit: 'It wasn't the best thing to do'



When passers-by saw what looked like a dead body being wheeled through a university campus, they immediately called the police.

Officers quickly swooped on De Montfort University, fearing they might be about to embark on a murder investigation.



But after trawling through CCTV footage and interviewing local business owners to find out if a crime had been committed they found the 'body' was actually just a mannequin used to teach medical students.

De Montfort University, where a dummy was mistaken for a dead body. Police raced to the campus after a passer-by called convinced he had seen a corpse.

It was being wheeled by hospital staff to a lecture at the university who had decided it was too nice a day to drive.



But so lifelike was the dummy that when Tony Cope, who owns a pub in the area, saw stills from campus security cameras he was convinced the 'gruesome' image was of a corpse.

Police had visited him to see if his security cameras had filmed the body being wheeled past his pub.



A dummy of the kind that officers were relieved to discover after being called to look for a corpse

He said: 'The police came to see my footage and of course I said yes, but when I asked them what they were looking for they showed me this picture of a dead body taken by the camera across the road.

'It put me on a bit of a downer to be honest. I wasn’t expecting to see a dead body. It was gruesome. They didn’t say anything about it being a mannequin.

'To be fair to whoever called police, it looked exactly like a body wrapped in black bags slumped in a wheelchair.

'I couldn’t believe my eyes. It looked real. I’m relieved to find out it was a mannequin.'

Leicestershire Police received a call reporting 'a person with a body in a wheelchair' at 8.30am on Friday.

A spokesman said: 'Police went to check it wasn’t anything sinister and made inquiries. There was some training at the Leicester Royal Infirmary and it was part of that.'

The mannequin can be plugged into a computer to simulate emergency situations, such as a heart attack, and was being transported by hospital staff to be used by nursing students at the university.

A spokesman for the hospital said: 'They were doing some training for medical students at De Montfort University. It was such a nice day they decided to walk rather than drive.

'In hindsight they realised it wasn’t the best thing to do.