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Organised and Financial Crime Agency of New Zealand (OFCANZ). “Despite our staff clearly identifying themselves Mr Dotcom retreated into the house and activated a number of electronic locking mechanisms,” he said. “While police neutralised these locks he then further barricaded himself into a safe room within the house which officers had to cut their way into. Once they gained entry into this room they found Mr Dotcom near a firearm which had the appearance of a shortened shotgun. It was definitely not as simple as knocking at the front door.”

It was a statement Mr Wormald repeated at a press conference later that day: “It's fair to say there were a range of security measures we had to get beyond. It wasn't simply a case of going up and knocking on the door.”

It would later be argued this statement was inaccurate on a number of fronts: whether police cut their way into anything or whether Dotcom's bodyguard showed them where to find his boss, frightened and waiting in the panic room. Whether when they found Dotcom there, he was “near a firearm” at all, or whether it was in an apparently closed gunsafe across the other side of a long room, some distance from an overweight and unwieldy Dotcom.

As for “going up and knocking on the door”, Mona Dotcom said later: “If the police had come to our door in a peaceful way I firmly believe that Kim would have co-operated with them and gone to the police station if he had been asked to do so. Kim is not a violent man in any way and would not resist the police. He would put my and my children's situation first.”

As the case unfolded, it turned out that “knocking on the door” was exactly what police had done the day before.

These were all details withheld on the day of the raid. The first hints of the grand farce emerged the day after the raid — the day of Kim Dotcom's birthday and the aborted party which the FBI had expected would see all its targets gathered in one place.

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