Video: Bulgaria police pepper spray themselves while trying to disperse protesters

Sofia, March 21: Law-keepers using pepper spray to disperse protesting crowd is a common scene across the globe. But something that happened on the roads of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, of late, is quite unique.

Protesters gathered outside the parliament in the city demanding early elections and the local police, as usual, tried to disperse them by spraying pepper spray. However, their act fetched an entirely opposite result. As one of the police officers sprayed pepper spray directly into the air, he failed to gauge the direction in which the wind was blowing and it came back to hit the officers' eyes instead. The protesters, on the other hand, remained largely unharmed.

Bulgarian police used pepper spray against protesters in front of parliament, but didn't take the wind direction into account pic.twitter.com/B8b7uQyIEG

— Jasper Neve (@JasperNeve) March 17, 2019

A video of the funny incident was shared on Twitter by one user and it went viral. Many police officers were seen cleaning their eyes with water.

The user, Jasper Neve, also said in another tweet that Bulgaria is a largely peaceful nation where protests are not regular and the goof-up with the pepper spray showed that the police too were inexperienced in handling it. A lot of Twitter users though didn't agree to the viewpoint that Bulgaria is a peaceful country.

Bulgaria is a peaceful country, where protests very rarely go more violent than a bit of pushing.
This explains the inexperience of the police with things like pepper spray.

— Jasper Neve (@JasperNeve) March 17, 2019

The video of the incident received quite a few funny reactions:

this is more related to lack of training than inexperience

— Johnny Vegas (@JVegas_) March 19, 2019

You don't have to be a genius to realise you can't piss into the wind

— Mitchell Crane (@mitchcrane) March 17, 2019

and it seems a very sweet pepper sprays (I twitt from Paris…)

— Cobab (@Krobab) March 17, 2019