Canada's Chretien confesses Italian rooftop prank
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Chretien laughs as someone pays tribute to him in the House of Commons on November 6.
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TORONTO, Canada (Reuters) -- And now we know what at least one of the world's leaders has done when his guards aren't looking.
Feeling shackled by the Canadian Mounties and Italian Carabinieri paramilitary police who were protecting him ahead of a 2001 G8 summit in northern Italy, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his grandson scampered across rooftops to get free.
"My grandson said, 'Grandpapa, let's escape.' So we managed to escape ... and it was quite a thrill. You know, we jumped from one roof to the other roof to a third roof," Chretien said with a boyish chuckle in remarks broadcast on CBC radio on Thursday.
"And when we arrived [at the edge of the third roof] there was a bunch of Carabinieri cars there, and my grandson wanted to slide along the pipe.
"[But] these guys shoot and ask questions after that, so we went back and we found another way and we managed to escape for about an hour," said Chretien, who is set to step down after a decade as prime minister
After spending some time on their own outside the compound, near Florence, they sauntered back in.
And the reaction of the security detail? "They were not worried, because they saw us coming back through the main door, and they said, 'Oh, we thought you were inside'."
He added: "It was the spirit of Italy, I guess, that led me to do that."
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