Burger King staff tricked into smashing restaurant windows

Employees of a Burger King in Minnesota smashed the windows of their fast-food restaurant after a prank caller claiming to be a fireman told them they needed to "let the pressure out".

Video footage taken by bystanders shows two employees kicking out panes of glass from the front of the restaurant, in the Minneapolis suburb of Coon Rapids. [[{"type":"media","view_mode":"content_original","fid":"93317","attributes":{"class":"media-image"}}]]

Police officers arrived on the scene to find the employees still smashing windows, having evacuated customers from the restaurant.

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"The manager explained they'd received a phone call from a male, who identified himself as a fireman, who said there were dangerous levels of gas in the building and they had to break out all the windows to keep the building from blowing up," police sergeant Rick Boone told the Star Tribune. "The manager was frantic and actually believed the building was going to blow."

Officers are now hunting the prank caller responsible for last Friday's stunt, which resulted in the Burger King remaining closed and boarded up during the weekend.

Emergency services would "never" make a call of this kind, said the police in a statement. "In the event you receive a call from someone claiming to be from a police or fire agency asking you to take some kind of action, consider it a prank and call 911 immediately," it added.

It is not the first high-profile hoax to strike the franchise. The day before, damage estimated at $10,000 (£7,000) was caused to the windows of a Burger King in Shawnee, Oklahoma, after a similar incident, while in February, employees in Morro Bay, California, rammed a car into the building due to a supposed gas leak.

Fast-food restaurants are a common target for low-level pranks, but some hoaxes have taken a darker turn. In 2004, a caller posing as a police officer convinced the manager of a McDonald's in Mount Washington, Kentucky, and her fiancé to strip search and sexually assault an employee. The employee sued the restaurant for failing to protect her, and received a settlement of $1.1m (£0.8m).