No joke as police start body hunt

A FACEBOOK joke has seen police across France spending more than a week hunting a corpse after a youth borrowed his father's mobile phone.

Police in Toulouse were called after an engineer received a text in the middle of the night saying "I've hidden the body. What do we do now?"

It was not from anyone on his list of saved numbers, so he contacted police who launched a search for the body and the supposed killers.

Police found the message had been sent from a mobile phone owned by a man in Brittany. But when police in Lorient took up the hunt they found that the 50-year-old local man had no criminal record.

They also found no one had been reported missing.

Police fixed the position of the phone and confronted the man at work where he denied all knowledge of sending such a message.

Then his 15-year-old son owned up... It turned out to have been a Facebook challenge sent by other users and he had sent the text to a number picked out by hazard.

Now the youngster has been given a warning by police for sending them on a wild goose chase.