Danish Pokémon hunter killed in traffic accident

The man was driving a small delivery van, and in a comment to TV2, police said they found the popular Pokémon Go app still running on the man’s phone when they arrived on the scene.

“When we arrived at the scene of the accident, we found his phone unlocked with the Pokémon app running. We cannot know for certain whether he was playing the game at the time of the accident, however,” Jørn Kristen Nielsen from the Himmerland local police told TV2, although there is reason to believe this was the case.

“Normally a phone will lock itself if it is not in use, but we found his phone unlocked with the app running,” he noted.

Police were first notified of the accident at 5:17am on Thursday and were on site 10 minutes later. The officers estimated that the accident likely occurred up to an hour prior to their arrival.

The Pokémon Go app has been a global phenomenon since it was introduced earlier this month. Denmark is no exception to the new craze, with police districts across the country fielding calls from concerned residents reporting the suspicious behaviour of what turned out to be Pokémon Go players. 

The game’s popularity in Denmark led the Copenhagen Vestegns Police to issue guidelines for players, telling them to carefully consider how their behaviour appears to others, to never enter private property and to be sure to look up from their phones to avoid traffic accidents. 

The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) also had to issue a warning to Pokémon Go players who tried to break into a construction site on university grounds to play the game. 

Last week, another Danish man searching after Pokémon monsters found a corpse in a drainage canal in Odense.

Danish police later identified the corpse as belonging to a 41-year-old man who had been reported missing since May last year, according to Ritzau.

Andreas Bruun from the local police told the news agency that the man had a criminal record with several convictions.

“At present there is nothing which indicates the man’s death was the result of a crime,” Bruun told Ritzau.