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‘Explosive device’ strapped to 18-year-old daughter of wealthy businessman turns out to be fake An Australian teenager who was trapped in her Sydney home after a stranger in a balaclava reportedly attached a suspicious device around her neck turned out to be the victim of an elaborate hoax. The deception was only discovered, however, after a 10-hour ordeal. Madeleine Pulver, 18, the daughter of a wealthy business executive, was released after police, taking advice from the British military, managed to remove the device, described as “very elaborate, very sophisticated”. New South Wales state police assistant commissioner Mark Murdoch said this morning that the device was “a very, very elaborate hoax”. “But it was made and certainly gave the appearance of a legitimate improvised explosive device,” he said outside the high school student’s home at Mosman in Sydney. “We had to treat it seriously until we could prove otherwise and that’s exactly what we did and that’s why it took so long.” The alarm had earlier been raised at 2.30pm Australian time on Wednesday and streets were closed to traffic near the home of William Pulver, chief executive of the technology company Appen, and his wife Belinda in the wealthy north shore suburb of Mosman. Murdoch said it was too early to say whether the device had been placed as part of an extortion attempt. “It was affixed to her by a chain or something similar, which took us a fair while to remove … and that added to the trauma that Madeleine experienced,” Murdoch said, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. “There were some instructions left by the offender at the scene and those instructions will provide us with further lines of inquiry,” Murdoch told ABC radio. The teenager was reunited with her parents, who had been kept out of the house during the rescue for their own safety. She was taken to hospital for an examination and released at 3am local time. “She’s good. She’s been kept in a very uncomfortable position. She has been and will be uncomfortable for a little while to come,” he said. “The family are at a loss to explain this,” said Murdoch. “You would hardly think someone would go to this much trouble if there wasn’t a motive behind it.” It was, he added, one of the most bizarre cases he had seen in his career. The investigation was being led by the robbery and serious crime squad. The Australian newspaper reported that police confirmed the teenager had “interaction with the person who was responsible” for placing the device. There were unconfirmed reports that a man wearing a balaclava had broken into the house and strapped a device he claimed was a bomb to the teenager’s neck or wrist. One report said he told her he could trigger it by remote control, and that it had a microphone attached enabling him to hear what she was saying. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported that police believed a ransom note was attached to the girl’s neck, but bomb disposal officers had been unable to read it. Friends of Pulver, who is believed to attend a private school and to be taking her Higher School Certificate, were said to have gathered at the police cordon during the incident. Appen, the company her father works for, provides linguistics technologies to companies including Microsoft, Google and Nokia. The family are reported to be among the wealthiest in Sydney. Australia Caroline Davies Lizzy Davies guardian.co.uk