Three teenage boys have been arrested after inadvertently entering President Donald Trump’s Florida resort with a loaded AK47 assault rifle.
A chase began after Palm Beach police attempted to approach their car, which was parked near the president’s Mar-a-Lago club.
The boys, aged 15, jumped a wall while fleeing and were later found hiding on the property.
Mr Trump was not there at the time and the resort is currently closed.
Police spokesman Michael Ogrodnick told AP News that the boys were found parked about two miles (three kilometres) from the club, and fled when officers approached. The boys later saw police conducting a separate traffic stop outside the resort and wrongly thought it was a roadblock set up to catch them.
According to a police report, they then left the car and fled into the club. They allegedly dumped a backpack containing the loaded semi-automatic rifle and a 14-round magazine on a seawall at the property.
“They had no idea where they were,” Mr Ogrodnick said, adding that they were lucky that Mr Trump’s family was not there, as they might otherwise have been shot by the Secret Service.
The teens were charged with trespassing with a firearm, burglary with a firearm and resisting arrest without violence.
The suspects, who are not being named, are being held in a juvenile detention centre as authorities determine whether to prosecute them as adults.
There have been numerous intrusions to the Mar-a-Lago property since Mr Trump became president in 2017, including the arrest of a Chinese woman carrying computer malware and a man who pretended to be a member of the president’s helicopter crew.
Chinese trespasser jailed for Mar-a-Lago incident
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