One man almost lost an eye, a woman had her leg broken and one teenager was badly burnt when the hairspray used as the propellant exploded in his face as he prepared to fire.

A 16-year-old in the university city of Göttingen lost part of his ear when the firing chamber ripped open as he pulled the trigger.

The so-called Kartoffelkanone are made from piping and masking tape bought at any hardware store. With a range of 200 metres they could split a man’s head at 15 metres and penetrate a wooden wall at 90 metres.

The guns are not governed by the usual strict firearms regulations in Germany, but prosecutors in the republic’s 16 states are passing emergency rulings to try to outlaw them.

Horst Przbyla, a munitions expert for police in Brandenburg near Berlin, said: “What started out as an extreme form of paintball has become deadly dangerous. Certainly, anyone caught in the path of the projectiles can expect to sustain very serious injuries indeed. It can only be a matter of time until the first death.”

Police are considering asking leading hardware chains to sell piping only to adults.

Local stores that sell hairsprays and pressurised lighter fluid, the favourite propellants for the DIY weapons, may also be asked to sell them only to adults. Failing that, police suggest that youngsters should have to explain why they are buying them.

A website used by the Kartoffelkanone enthusiasts was receiving only 20 hits a day just three months ago: now there are more than 700.

German police fear that the youths will turn to more lethal ammunition than potatoes. Tests have shown that such a bazooka firing an empty film canister filled with sand and the cardboard centres of toilet rolls filled with cement could penetrate brickwork.

An apple fired from one of the guns almost took out the eye of a middle-aged man near the Baltic coast.

In Bavaria a 55-year-old woman suffered severe injuries when a potato smashed into her thigh as she walked near woodland with her dog. A school in Weinstadt in Baden-Württemberg recently came under a potato barrage from children playing truant, while in the Taunus region several windows of a block of flats were smashed.

The hairspray is ignited using a battery which provides a spark. Some youths have made multi-barrelled potato cannons, resembling the Soviet Katyusha rocket launchers of the Second World War and capable of firing at a phenomenal rate.

Thuringia in the east has imposed a ban on the guns and four youngsters in the town of Schlotheim caught by police had their weapons destroyed and were sentenced to 25 hours community service. Police also caught two teenagers with a cannon nearly 6ft long in one Rhineland town. A spokesman for the police in Brandenburg said: “Woodland on Sundays echoes to the thump-thump of these guns. It is a growing social problem that needs to be tackled.”

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