The soldiers said in court that at first, they thought the gunshots were blanks or part of a training exercise.
An investigation revealed that a technician had mistakenly put a war-games tape, intended as part of a training exercise, into the computer.
Officially, the more than 600 American forces here are part of a "training exercise" to improve the Philippine military's ability to fight terrorists.
The FSB eventually said it had planted the bomb but that it was a fake and the incident was part of a training exercise.
A fake bomb planted by a security company as part of a training exercise at Old Trafford caused the cancellation of Manchester United's final Premier League game of the season when the firm forgot to take it away.
Bear Grylls has been criticised by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) after reportedly leaving his young son on top of a group of rocks in Wales as part of a training exercise.
The Interfax news service said the deputy general prosecutor, Valery Kalmogorov, also upheld the domestic intelligence agency's assertion that so-called bombs the agency admitted placing in a building in Ryazan were in fact sacks of sugar, part of a training exercise.
Soldiers – many of whom were clueless teenage conscripts who apparently thought they were part of a training exercise – were rounded up, beaten, stripped and, according to some reports, lynched (one particularly distressing image of a beheaded soldier emerged on Saturday morning on social media).
