The record
The Explosive Ordnance Disposal Bureau is the Hong Kong Police Force's bomb squad: set up in 1972 with British Army expertise, wholly staffed by Hong Kong officers from 1993, and today a stand-alone unit of the Operations and Support Wing that deals with everything from wartime ordnance dug up on building sites to improvised devices, underwater disposal and chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear incidents, as well as training the rest of the force and inspecting explosives stores. Its vehicles have to carry a great deal — protective suits, robots, tools, containment equipment — which is how a Land Rover came to be stretched to three axles.
AM 6788 is that vehicle: a Defender 130 converted to six-wheel drive with a driven bogie of two rear axles, retaining the four-door crew cab and carrying behind it a box body wider and taller than the cab, with a roof rack above it. It wears the force's standard livery of the period — white with red front wings and a red band edged in blue along the waist — with 警 POLICE 察 on the cab doors and the box side, BOMB DISPOSAL and 爆炸品處理 lettered beneath, a mirrored POLICE on the bonnet for the benefit of rear-view mirrors, a spare wheel on the bonnet, a winch in the front bumper, blue lamps at the bumper ends, a red-and-blue light bar and an air-conditioning pod on the cab roof, and the unit's '4 EOD' callsign plate on the bumper. The reference photograph was taken by Daryl Chapman on a Hong Kong highway on 9 September 2010. Who carried out the six-wheel conversion, and whether the Bureau ran more than one such vehicle, is not stated in the sources consulted.
